


Fledged

by fiorinda_chancellor



Series: Fledged [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: "Falling is like flying"?, Alternate Universe, BAMF!John, Flying, Johnlock - Freeform, Johnlock Roulette, M/M, Serious flying, Wing Kink (occasional), Wingfic, Winglock, Wingsex (eventual), flight, for a change
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-17
Updated: 2012-08-17
Packaged: 2017-11-12 08:41:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 34,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/488929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fiorinda_chancellor/pseuds/fiorinda_chancellor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For a change, it <i>begins</i> with a fall. </p><p>Dr. John Watson comes back from Afghanistan to London in a world where some are fledged and some aren't -- not that that he minds that one way or the other; nothing happens to <i>him</i> any more. Then one afternoon he meets an enigmatic figure in the lab at Bart's, a man who sees something unusual about John... and his whole life starts to slide sideways like a hawk banking in the wind. </p><p>A wingfic with occasional G-force, "Fledged" is the first of a series of nine novellas, each of which will parallel one episode of the Sherlock series to date and then begin branching away from BBC!Sherlock canon as they explore the world of the winged and the wingless. Each novella will be posted complete, usually in six or eight chapters.</p><p>Scheduling news and background notes about the Fledged universe will turn up from time to time at <a href="http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com">the Lotus Room blog.</a></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Passager

He was falling.

His arms were spread wide, flailing at the air as if they might actually be able to make some kind of difference. But they didn’t, and that unforgiving pavement was rushing up at him, his death sentence. He tried desperately to at least twist the upper half of his body away and upward, with some bizarre thought of not leaving those who’d have to clean this mess up with a splatter of brains as well as a corpse now just a bag of broken bones. And then came the impact all along him, that dreadful slam of shock like a deafening shout of pain—

…that kicked John Watson upright in his bed, sweating with fear, as the shout’s echo faded. There he sat gasping, eyes stinging, furious and mortified, while his shoulder ached and throbbed.

John hunched forward, wiped the sweat off his face, scrubbed at his eyes: then dropped his hands to the chilly, soaked sheets and scowled around him in the dimness. Thin early-morning light was seeping through the bedsit’s shut curtains, faintly touching the bare beige walls, the desk, the chair. Everything was perfectly normal, and he had _not_ just been shot. He concentrated on forcing his breathing into something like regularity, and listened to his heart hammering in his ears as it slowed.

 _Oh, please, let this stop. Just let it stop._ But the words were mere reflex. If anything had ever actually heard him thinking _“Please God, let me live,”_ it plainly wasn’t listening now, or didn’t care. John was on his own, as he had been for a long time now; as he had been since getting off the plane at Heathrow and realizing that the whole army he’d had at his back for years was suddenly gone, and he was alone.

The hammering in his ears was slowly quieting. John breathed out, breathed in, starting to hear the faint sounds from outside: traffic noise slowly scaling up as rush hour got started, the distant two-tone yell of an ambulance siren heading west, the faint whistle of wind whining in through that crack where the bedsit’s window didn’t quite close right. _Another day exactly like yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that,_ John thought wearily as his eyes came to rest on the desk, more a shadow than a solid thing in this light. He sat there for a few seconds more, simply loathing the desk for its contents—specifically what lay in its top drawer: the laptop, John’s link to the Web and the useless blog, so far empty of so much as a single posting and getting more empty and annoying every day.

Yet habit was already reasserting itself, though this looked exactly like every other nothing-happens day of his life since he’d come home from Afghanistan. It wasn’t John’s habit to spend a second more of his conscious day than he had to sitting around in this bleak patch of beigeness. And early as it was, after an awakening like that there was no point in trying to get back to sleep: the T-shirt and pyjama pants he’d worn to bed were as soaked as the sheets, and he was shivering.

 _Shower,_ John thought. That way at least he could get warm again, as the bedsit’s central heating didn’t come on this early. He sighed, swung his legs out of bed, and stood cautiously, bearing most of his weight on the good leg: then took the habitual cautious first steps of the day. They were always experimental, as there was no way to tell from day to day how the bad leg was going to be acting.

Today it ached, as usual, from hip to knee, in sympathy with the shoulder. The habitual, weary thought came up: if the pain was only in the shoulder, it somehow wouldn’t be so bad. But the leg simply made no sense. _This isn’t about sense,_ John’s therapist Ella kept saying. _Yes,_ John always very much wanted to retort, _I get that. That would also be why you’re constantly trying to get me to write a blog when nothing ever happens to me any more._ But he never said it, because another of John’s habits was to be as civil as possible to his fellow health professionals, even when they were idiots.

He limped over to the desk, pulled the drawer open and stared down into it. There was the laptop, and under it the dark butt-end of the Sig Sauer he’d smuggled home, a last souvenir of what he’d once been. They stared back at him as the last fragments of the dream—his windmilling arms, the air blasting up past him—faded away, drowning in anodyne beige.

John sighed, knowing that soon enough the dream would be back. What Ella couldn’t tell him (not that she ever told him much of anything) was why none of his dreams were ever of _good_ things any more. There had been one in particular that had often visited him out there, even at the busiest and most difficult of times: a dream of one of those nights you often got in Helmand during the spring or autumn, down by the border with Pakistan in the Chagai Hills. It was night in the dream, with everything for miles around drowned in a profound silence, and the sky above the mountain walls glittered with swarms of stars in a warm darkness so velvety and deep that it seemed you could feel space leaning down around you, mantling everything as if in dark soft wings. So often when John was still at Bastion he’d awakened happily from the peace and beauty of that dream, wrapped in the warmth of it right through waking, even in those times of never-ending excitement and stress. But that had been before the bullet: before the shot that had ripped away his health and his joy and the work that had made his life worth living—

John shut the drawer and went over to the curtains, pushing them open. The light improved nothing except the view of the bedsit’s bare-walled interior, utterly empty of anything beautiful, or interesting, or even dangerous. There were only two dangerous things in here—him and the Sig—and he frankly wasn’t all that sure about himself any more. Certainly the Army had had no second thoughts on the matter.

John turned and headed for the bathroom, setting in motion the daily train of other habitual behaviors. After he was finished in there he’d have his morning tea, and his first-of-five-servings-of-fruit-a-day apple. He would spend an hour or so beating his brain against the laptop’s screen as he once more tried and failed to find words for the blog: and then he would get dressed and briefly escape the beige cage of the bedsit for the larger cage that was central London.

The city itself was a habit, though a cherished one, the place where he’d studied and trained; and John was quite aware of how he was clinging to its now-comfortless security while he tried to find his way. He would spend today, like so many days before, limping from place to place and investigating his options—beating himself against the bars of the cage and looking for a way out. _Or a way back in,_ he thought. After so much time spent trying already, both options were beginning to seem equally futile.

But he had to keep trying, keep fighting, because that was habit too. _I will not let this take me down,_ John thought. _Right now it seems like nothing will ever change. But if I stay in shape, if I take care of myself, sooner or later something has to shift. And when it does, I’ll be ready._ This was the only place where he and Ella were on the same page—she, because she felt sure it would eventually be true: he, because if it _wasn’t_ … John pushed himself away from that thought, as always, with force.

Rather later, when he’d finished not blogging, and was showered and dressed, John opened the drawer to put away the laptop, and gazed at what would lie under it: the Sig, and—under that, pushed off to one side of the drawer—a raggedly torn-out page from a paperback book, shoved into a small zip-loc bag of the kind that medical staff sometimes used to attach personal effects to a patient’s bedside chart. The page had been given to John by one of his former patients back at Camp Bastion. The youngster had then been about to go home to the Midlands after two rounds of reconstructive and six weeks of physio for his leg trauma, while John was still only half-healed after his colleagues had finished sticking a quarter pound of pins and plating in his chest. “You might need this more than I do now,” the lad had said, shyly offering him the bit of plastic-sealed paper. And John had taken it gratefully, and had later had it cable-tied it to his bed’s headboard, where the torn page would always be nearby though he didn’t have to look at it all the time.

Centered on the now slightly yellowed page were seven lines:

_When Heaven is about to confer  
A great office upon a man,  
It first exercises his mind with suffering  
And his sinews and bones with toil:  
It exposes him to poverty  
And confounds all his undertakings.  
Then it is seen if he is ready._

It was something from a Japanese poet of three centuries back. The ‘great office’ bit was bollocks as far as John was concerned, but the rest of it had seemed like an idea worth adopting: that life was a test, and one you could pass if you just hung on. Now John reached down into the drawer and touched the little plastic envelope with one finger and a pained, dry half-smile. _Suffering? Check. Sinews and bones plus toil? Check. Poverty? Double check. Confounded undertakings? Oh,_ God, _triple check and underline._

John let out a breath, put the laptop away and shut the drawer. _So, we’re ready then. Let’s get on with it._

_***_

And out he went walking: another day, another park—he’d been doing them in rotation so as not to get bored. John was becoming a connoisseur of London parks: the easygoing vibe of Regent’s Park, the storybook-laced romantic nostalgia of Kensington Gardens, the more uptight, regimented feel of Green Park and St. James’s. And today around lunchtime he was making his way through St. John’s Gardens to the inevitable 2/4 syncopation of the good leg and the bad-one-and-the-cane, breathing steady and counting his pulse to make sure he stayed in aerobic-exercise territory for at least forty minutes nonstop, when a voice behind him said, “John? John Watson!”

He stopped and turned, initially surprised and then confused. From the park bench he’d just passed, a stocky man was scrambling to his feet: casual jacket, raglan-checked shirt, slightly noisy stripy tie. There was something about the combination that tweaked at John’s memory as he looked at the gent’s round face. Glasses, dark hair, receding hairline, a smile slightly uncertain but going broader, the eyes bright and crinkling up a little at the sight of him— “Stamford. Mike Stamford! We were at Bart’s together—“

And of course the connection then clicked right in, along with the inevitable embarrassment that came with not recognizing an old friend instantly: _where’d the skinny bloke go?_ Yet Mike’s old grin was still here, though a little sheepish. “I got fat…” So when Mike went on to the question of what had happened to John, the rhythm of the moment and the memory of how close they’d once been immediately made John say: “I got shot…” And it was very odd how much less empty London suddenly felt to John, how much less estranging and estranged.

They went and got coffee, then sat down and talked: and John was embarrassed by how much he had been missing this kind of easy conversation, but also by how much it obscurely hurt him—the edges of his life-then and life-now rasping painfully together inside him like two ends of a broken bone. With Mike he exchanged the inevitable shortlist of the ways life had betrayed them both: fat and bullets, the ennui of being out of work and the occasional frustration of being in it— “Teaching at Bart’s. Bright young things like we used to be. God, I hate them!” Which would have been a bit of a fib, for Mike had never had a hating bone in his body, and John could tell he didn’t have one now. If anything Mike ran to a deep but also dryly amused compassion, and also shrewdness; he’d always had a gift for reading people and knowing who could be trusted.

John drank his coffee and limped his way through his end of the conversation, which went the way such things routinely now did with those he’d known in what he’d increasingly begun thinking of as “his past life”. Wounds, army pension, money and the lack of it, the family he mostly didn’t have and how what little he _did_ have couldn’t or wouldn’t be of any help. And then the issue that had been haunting him: where he was going to go next. He couldn’t stay in London: he couldn’t afford it. But Mike seemed to think John needed London—could even find a flatmate somewhere. John laughed at the idea. “Who’d want me for a flatmate?”

And then it was Mike’s turn to laugh. “You’re the second person to say that to me today.”

John blinked. “Who was the first?”

***

As they made their way over to St. Bart’s, John found himself wondering why he hadn’t been out this way since he came back. _Was it just because I was so happy then, and so_ not _happy now… and I didn’t want one state contaminating the other?_

It was a simplistic answer—the kind he might have offered Ella, during a session, to give her the idea that he was trying to meet her halfway. But when they came around the corner and John looked up at the old looming windows, he was surprised and a little unnerved by the way his gut clenched inside him with memories and feelings he hadn’t had cause to access for years: youthful energy, a muted but building excitement, the memory of the slow acquisition of accomplishment and the gradually solidifying certainty that this was really what he was meant to be doing in the world. John worked hard to clamp down on all those superannuated feelings as the two of them went in and stopped by Mike’s book-crammed and paperwork-piled little cubby of an office, where his old friend dropped his coat over the chair behind his cluttered desk and riffled perfunctorily through his inbox for anything new.

Mike didn’t linger; within a few seconds they were out again, heading down corridors that felt familiar but had been sufficiently redone in recent years to leave John still feeling unnervingly like a stranger. He remembered the lab they were headed to, but found it stuffed with better equipment than the school had ever had when he was there. And there were other differences.

Off in the far corner, as they came in, a tall slim dark-haired man was bent over a staging table with a scored titration dropper, intently dosing a slide; which was interesting, as in his tailored dark jacket and white shirt he looked more as if he belonged at some smart-casual evening event than in a lab. Or else he might have been destined for some kind of modeling shoot, with that long high-cheekboned face and those odd pale slant-set eyes. These favored Mike and John with a quick intent glance as they came in, then shifted back to the work at hand.

 _Must be independently wealthy if he’s not worried about getting reagent on a jacket like that,_ John thought with slight amusement, and turned his attention back to the room. “Bit different from my day…”

Mike grinned. “You have no idea.”

“Mike, can I borrow your phone?” said the man in the corner in a clear resonant baritone. “There’s no signal on mine.”

“What’s wrong with the land line?”

“I prefer to text…”

“Sorry,” Mike said, “it’s in my coat.” He ambled down the other side of the center lab table.

 _Well,_ John thought, _if this chap knows Mike well enough to just ask for his phone—_ “Uh, here,” John said, reaching into his pocket: “use mine.”

“Oh,” the man said with slight surprise, glancing at Mike, then back to John again; an appraising look. “Thank you.”

“That’s an old friend of mine,” Mike said, indicating John: “John Watson.”

John held out his phone. The man in the tailored jacket came over and accepted it, popped it open, started quickly working the keys with long fingers. And then, without looking up, he said, “Afghanistan or Iraq?”

John blinked in surprise. He looked over at Mike, who was simply regarding them both with a half-smile.

“Sorry?” John said to the man working away at his phone’s keypad.

“Which was it, Afghanistan or Iraq?” And those blue-grey eyes were suddenly bent on John as if their owner was expecting some particular reaction.

John threw another glance at Mike, but Mike just sat there with that smile, as if none of this struck him as unusual. “Afghanistan,” John said after a moment. “Sorry, how did you—”

“Ah, Molly, coffee, thank you,” the man said, handing John back his phone as a plainly-pretty young woman in a white lab coat came in. “What happened to the lipstick?…”

John was at the moment beyond being concerned about anybody’s lipstick. A brief conversation about this ensued while John stood there putting his phone away in complete and fascinated astonishment, wondering where the hell that question had come from, and _how._ By the time the woman went out, the man in the dark jacket was back in the corner again with his coffee. “How do you feel about the violin?” he said.

“Sorry, what?” John said, glancing at Mike again for some kind of indicator: but Mike just sat there and smiled that amused half-smile.

“I play the violin when I’m thinking. Sometimes I don’t talk for days on end. Would that bother you? Potential flatmates should know the worst about each other.”

Another glance at Mike. “You told him about me.”

Mike shook his head. “Not a word.”

“Then who said anything about flatmates?”

“I did,” the man said, reaching down for a big dark tweed coat and slipping into it. “Told Mike this morning that I must be a difficult man to find a flatmate for. Now here he is, just after lunch, with an old friend just home from military service in Afghanistan.” He finished doubling up a blue wool scarf and looping it around his throat. “Wasn’t a difficult leap.”

 _Now_ how _the hell_ — “How did you know about Afghanistan?” John said.

“Got my eye on a nice little place in central London,” the man said, glancing at his own phone and tucking it away as he headed toward John; “together we ought to be able to afford it.” Those oddly arresting eyes were fixed on John again. “We’ll meet there tomorrow evening, seven o’clock. Sorry, got to dash, I think I left my riding crop in the mortuary.” And with a slight smile he headed past John for the door.

The casually-tossed-off yet inexplicably deep insight into John, the weight of the other’s slightly unnerving regard, and the sudden sense that he’d been weighed in some odd scale and not found wanting, were all working together to pull John’s pulse well up into aerobic-conditioning territory again. “Is that it?” he said, admittedly a little sharply.

“Is that what?” said the man, turning back as John turned to face him. But as John finished moving, he suddenly became aware that the other’s gaze had angled up to examine the air above John’s left shoulder.

The hair on the back of John’s neck rose. For the moment he tried to ignore it. “We’ve only just met and we’re going to look at a flat?”

“Problem?”

John glanced again at Mike, but Mike just smiled.

“We don’t know a thing about each other,” John said to the man in the dark coat. “I don’t know where we’re meeting; I don’t even know your name.”

The man’s eyes dropped to meet John’s again. “I know you’re an Army doctor and you’ve been invalided home from Afghanistan,” he said. “I know you’ve got a brother who’s worried about you, but you won’t go to him for help because you don’t approve of him, possibly because he’s an alcoholic, but more likely because he’s recently walked out on his wife. And I know that your therapist thinks your limp’s psychosomatic; quite correctly, I’m afraid.” John shifted in surprise and slight discomfort at that. And once again, as John moved, the man’s light eyes flickered to the empty air above John’s right shoulder, and then back to the left again; though there was nothing there to see at the moment, nothing at all—

John’s left shoulderblade started itching as he stood there completely at a loss, and completely fascinated. “That’s quite enough to be going on with, don’t you think?” said the man in the coat, and headed for the door. But as he opened it he turned back to John, and there was a different look in those eyes now, almost one of mischief: a look that somehow said, _I dare you—!_ “The name’s Sherlock Holmes, and the address is two two one B Baker Street.” And he tipped John a wink, said “Afternoon!” to Mike, and was away.

Mike raised a finger in farewell as the door shut. John threw an astounded look at Mike.

Mike just nodded. “Yep… he’s always like that.”

John looked at the door and shifted uncomfortably again, feeling not just his left shoulder itching now, but both of them: as if something hidden there desired, irrationally, to be seen.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In falconers’ terminology, a “bird of passage” or “passager” is one not bred by humans for hunting purposes, but obtained directly from the wild. Originally it denoted an immature bird, but these days the term is also routinely used in British falconry to mean any bird originally of wild origin, regardless of age.


	2. Cast Off

On the dot of seven PM the next day, John limped up to the black door of 221B Baker Street and rapped on it with the old bronze knocker, just as a cab pulled up at the near kerb and a tall shape in a whirl of dark coat stepped out. “Ah, Mr. Holmes—”

“Sherlock, please.” He shook John’s hand: a strong grip, cordial enough if not effusive. John noted this with interest and added it to the rough mental sketch of the man he’d begun slowly assembling since first Googling him last night and reading through his website. He’d ended the evening with more questions than he’d started with, and a lot of answers that he was having trouble connecting up. At least John’s sleep had been untroubled, though he’d had some difficulty dropping off. The memory of the gaze of those pale eyes lingering on his, or intently examining the empty air over his shoulder, kept raising his pulse….

 _Well, let’s see how things go here._ John looked up at the building as they waited for the door to open. “Looks like a prime spot,” John said, glancing around them. “Must be expensive.”

“Mrs. Hudson—the landlady—she’s given me a special deal; she owes me a favour. A few years back her husband got himself sentenced to death in Florida. I was able to help her out.”

John blinked. “You stopped her husband from being executed?”

Sherlock turned an obscure and peculiarly satisfied smile on him. “Oh, no,” he said; “I ensured it.”

John blinked again, knocked off course in the act of getting ready to ask one of the twenty or thirty questions that had been incubating since last night. But the door opened, and a sweet-faced older woman in a stylish fuchsia dress looked out at them, saw who was there, and immediately reached out to hug John’s companion. “Sherlock!”

 _He got your husband_ executed _and you’re hugging him like a long-lost son?_ John thought, bemused. Another question to add to the pile. “Mrs. Hudson,” Sherlock said, hugging her back and letting her go to wave a hand at John, “Doctor John Watson.”

She smiled warmly at him. “Hello! Come in—”

Stairs to the second-floor flat went up from the entryway; Sherlock took them two at a time. John limped up after, and as he turned into the second flight of stairs, once again caught Sherlock looking at his left shoulder, and then above it. _I’ve_ got _to find out what’s going on with that!_ John thought as he made it up to the first-floor landing, a total of seventeen steps up: seventeen steps that would normally be bothering him much more than they were, except that his mind was presently afire with a growing curiosity that kept distracting him from the pain. _Well, after I look this place over there should be time to sit him down and get some answers…_

Later for that. Sherlock was flinging open the door to the flat, and John followed him in and was immediately surprised by how spacious and high-ceilinged the place was, though some of the wallpaper was on the old-fashioned side. “This could be very nice,” John found himself murmuring, despite the fact that the sitting room was cluttered with stacked-up boxes and paperwork and much less identifiable junk: “very nice indeed.” Fireplace, built-in bookshelves, big windows looking down into Baker Street… _and_ _what the hell kind of skull is that, and what’s going on with it? Not a cow. Bison maybe? And are those_ headphones _it’s wearing—?_ Quite a decent-sized kitchen… _and a kitchen table completely covered with labware? Erlenmeyer flasks, reducing columns,_ what _the hell—?_

“Yes, I think so,” Sherlock was saying, “my thoughts precisely. So I went straight ahead and—”

“As soon as we get all this rubbish cleaned out—”

“—moved in—”

 _Oops,_ John thought, looking up at Sherlock. “ _Ah_. So this is all, uh, your—”

Sherlock looked a touch stricken. “Well, obviously I can, uh, straighten things up…a bit…” And he promptly turned and began a bout of hasty and ineffective microtidying, finishing this up by pinning a small pile of hopefully unimportant correspondence to the mantelpiece with a Swiss Army knife that he stuck an inch deep through the letters into the wood.

John raised eyebrows at that, and then was briefly distracted. When he’d first come in, he’d had a fleeting impression that something was giving him a sidelong look from the mantelpiece. Now he saw that something still was. He pointed at it with his cane. “That’s a skull.”

Sherlock glanced at it. “Friend of mine. Well, I _say_ friend.” He turned away and slipped his coat off.

“What do you think, Doctor Watson?” Mrs. Hudson said. “There’s another bedroom upstairs, if you’ll be needing two bedrooms.“

John was caught a bit off guard by that, and started wondering what Sherlock might have said to her that could somehow have given her the wrong idea. “Of course we’ll be needing two.”

“Oh, don’t worry, there’s all sorts ‘round here!” Her voice dropped to an amused and conspiratorial whisper. “Mrs. Turner next door’s got _married_ ones.” She headed into the kitchen with the air of someone who liked to monitor the state of her rental property when the opportunity presented itself. “Oh, Sherlock, the mess you’ve made…!”

The tone smacked more of resigned tut-tutting than anything else. _At least she doesn’t sound overenthusiastic about it,_ John thought, relieved; he’d been on the wrong end of some genuinely unpleasant landlords and landladies during his uni years. Yet this woman had been standing right there and had made no comment when Sherlock started performing piercings on the furniture. _And since this really_ does _seem a nice place…_

It merely left the question of the flatmate, who was, to put it mildly, unusual. _Not that that’s necessarily a dealbreaker: I’m not exactly the average tenant myself…_ John turned to one of the chairs by the fireplace, gave the Union Jack pillow on the left-hand one a preemptive thump, and sat himself down while Sherlock popped the lid of a laptop on the table between the windows and booted it up.

It was as good an opening as any. “Looked you up on the Internet last night,” John said.

Sherlock straightened and turned, his expression neutral. Yet now that he was briefly standing still, the leashed energy about him was far more obvious—as if the only way he managed to stay still at all was by forcibly holding himself that way. “Anything interesting?”

“Found your website,” John said. “’The Science of Deduction.’”

Sherlock’s expression was overtly calm, but John caught the edge of eagerness on it, not entirely concealed. “What did you think?”

John couldn’t help it if the look he gave Sherlock was on the skeptical side. Some of the website’s claims had been unusual in the extreme, and Sherlock’s written responses to those who took issue with them had varied from the spiky to the scathing. Yet here in front of him was a man whose face actually fell a bit when it seemed praise wasn’t immediately forthcoming.  _Interesting,_ John thought, _coming from somebody with such a self-assured online presence…_ “You said you could tell an airline pilot by his left thumb…?”

“Yes,” Sherlock said, his eyes resting on John with what now looked like a touch of challenge. “And I can read your military career in your face and your leg, and your brother’s drinking habits in your mobile phone.”

 _Right to the heart of the problem,_ John thought. Yet for the moment there was no sign that John was about to be on the receiving end of any of the ruthless snark he’d seen visited on some commenters on Sherlock’s site. _Possibly because he’d rather not immediately piss off the potential flatmate…_? But the disconnect was interesting. And there were other issues with Sherlock’s thesis, though John was going to hold his fire on that count until he had a clearer answer to one question in particular. “How?”

Sherlock looked at John for a second longer, thenwith a slight smile turned away toward the window as Mrs. Hudson wandered in again from the kitchen, reading the front page of a tabloid. “How about these suicides then, Sherlock? Thought that’d be right up your street. Three, exactly the same…”

Sherlock was moving closer to the window, gazing down. There he paused, the smile falling away. “Four,” he said, gone taut with sudden tension. “There’s been a fourth. But there’s something different this time.”

 _What the_ — _!_ John thought. Then he caught the sound of sound of someone running up the stairs.

A tallish man with short dark-but-silvering hair and a black overcoat came hurrying in the door of the sitting room and paused just inside, sounding slightly out of breath. Without preamble, Sherlock said, “Where?”

“Brixton. Lauriston Gardens,” the visitor said in a rather gravelly voice with some East London in it.

“What’s new about this one? You wouldn’t have come to get me if there wasn’t something different.”

“You know how they never leave notes?”

“Yeah.”

“This one did.” And Sherlock’s eyes went sharp, suddenly alight with interest. “Will you come?”

“Who’s on forensics?”

“Anderson.”

Sherlock turned away, plainly put out. “He won’t work with me.”

“He won’t be your assistant—”

“I _need_ an assistant.”

“Will you come?”

Sherlock looked away. “Not in the police car. I’ll be right behind.”

“Thank you,” the man said, actually giving Sherlock a sort of half-bow, and was off down the stairs again.

John watched with some bemusement as Sherlock turned toward the window again, waiting for the sound of the downstairs door closing. He seemed quite still, but there was no missing the sense of that leashed energy building, or the leash starting to slip. And a few moments later Sherlock actually leapt in the air in what looked bizarrely like sheer glee, his fists clenched and half-punching the air.

“Brilliant!” He threw his head back, grinning almost ferally. “Yes! _Ohh!”_ Sherlock spun right around with his hands thrown up in delight, then went straight for his coat. “Four serial suicides and now a note… oh, it’s Christmas! Mrs. Hudson, I’ll be late, might need some food…”

“I’m your landlady, dear, not your housekeeper.” That resigned and affectionate tone again.

But Sherlock was oblivious: flinging the coat around himself, putting on that scarf, heading for the door. “Something cold will do! John, have a cup of tea, make yourself at home, don’t wait up!”

…and just like that he was gone again. _The energy of the man,_ John thought with a touch of wonder, and more than a touch of envy. The last time he’d seen people so intent, so alive, had been in Afghanistan. _Hell, I was_ one _of them. And now_ —

He looked down at his leg and found the damn cane in his hand, without any memory of actually having reached out for it… or indeed, of having let it go all the while he’d been sitting there. John regarded the thing with brief, carefully-masked loathing as the sound of someone plunging down the stairs in eager, headlong haste faded into the background.

“Look at him, dashing about!” Mrs. Hudson said, wandering back in. “My husband was just the same.” She gazed down at John. “But you’re more the sitting-down type, I can tell.”

John desperately hoped his face wasn’t showing anything of what he thought of the idea that anyone would consider him “the sitting-down type.” _Once upon a time, the only time anyone would have found me sitting down is if I was eating, sleeping between surgeries, or dead. …But once-upon-a-time’s the right phrase now, I guess. The fairytale adventure and excitement’s done. This is ‘ever-after’, and happily’s nowhere in sight…_

Mrs. Hudson was gazing down at John’s cane, at John’s hand gripping on it. He didn’t even have to look at her to know. He could feel it just as he did with everyone else—the way people saw the thing and what it symbolised, instead of seeing _him._

Mrs. Hudson sighed and headed off through the kitchen. “I’ll make you that cuppa. You rest your leg _—_ ”

 _“Damn_ my leg!”

And John was already mortified before Mrs. Hudson had had time to turn and stare at him in shock. “Sorry, I am _so_ sorry,” John said, and couldn’t even bear to look at Mrs. Hudson, who he was sure hadn’t meant to hurt him. “It’s just, sometimes, this bloody thing—” He whacked his leg with the cane, not sure which of them he was more furious with.

“I understand, dear,” Mrs. Hudson said, turning away again. “I’ve got a hip…”

“A cup of tea’d be lovely, thank you,” John said, dropping the cane with disgust and picking up the folded tabloid from the arm of the chair. Mrs. Hudson headed off, leaving John still feeling raw with embarrassment, but also grateful: at such times, tea was unquestionably a comfort. God only knew how much of it he’d gotten through since he got home. _Got_ back, he corrected himself in slightly bitter haste. There was no way the beige hell of the bedsit was home…

That train of thought was abruptly derailed by the sight of a picture of a dead MP under the tabloid’s fold, the most recent of the three apparent suicides that the article dealt with; and next to it, the rather grim-looking face of the man who’d just been standing inside the sitting room door, practically begging for Sherlock’s help. _DI Lestrade, in charge of the investigation—_

“You’re a doctor,” said a soft deep voice from the doorway.

John glanced up. There stood Sherlock, putting on his gloves. “In fact, you’re an _Army_ doctor.”

John put the paper aside, picked up the cane (not with any great enthusiasm) and stood. “Yes.”

“Any good?”

Once upon a time, John would have either just laughed at anyone who asked such a question, or possibly invited them to come outside and have their lights punched out. But these days, in his present situation, the question was fair. _“Very_ good,” he said.

And once again, John realized that Sherlock was looking over his left shoulder at something that was not there.

 _Is he seeing_ — John thought. _It’s not possible. How could he_ — _there’s no_ way _he could know—!_

Yet somehow he did. Which was bizarre enough: but maybe not as fascinating as the much more basic concept that Sherlock did actually _see_ him. Yesterday in the lab, after no more than two minutes’ worth of conversation, Sherlock had seen far more of John than the cane and the leg; _impossibly_ more. He’d seen, not symbols, not presumptions or assumptions or expectations, but what was there: _John._ And now John swallowed as the odd thought went through his head: _What else might he possibly see,_ _given time…?_

“Seen a lot of injuries, then,” Sherlock said, coming slowly toward him as he finished with his gloves. “Violent deaths…” His gaze was resting unsettlingly on John once more; and there, again, was that hint of challenge.

John met the gaze, wouldn’t look away. “Yes,” he said.

Sherlock stopped, quite close. “Bit of trouble too, I bet.”

“Of course,” John said, “yes.” Images of Maywand, of Nahr-e Saraj and Garmsir and so many other places where he’d fought and worked and healed, snapshots of blood and gunfire and danger and triumph, crowded through John’s mind. “Enough for a lifetime. Far too much.” … _Until suddenly it’s all done, and so’s your life—_

Sherlock was still looking down into John’s eyes, and there was that _I dare you!_ look again. “Want to see some more?”

And John’s heart flared bright and hot in him as a coal that’s been breathed on. “Oh God, _yes!_ ”

Sherlock whirled and made for the door. Without hesitation John followed.

***

Twilight was starting to fall around them as the cab headed south. ”Okay, you’ve got questions.”

 _You have no idea,_ John thought. “Where are we going?”

“Crime scene. Next?”

“Who are you? What do you do?”

The words “consulting detective” meant nothing to John: a made-up name, as Sherlock readily admitted. “When I met you for the first time yesterday, I said ‘Afghanistan or Iraq?’, and you looked surprised.”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“I didn’t know. I _saw_.” And in the space of the next two minutes Sherlock laid out before John those brief moments in the lab, and delicately dissected out from them John’s stance, his tan, his haircut, his limp, his training, his job, and his therapist—then, from the mobile phone John had handed him, John’s financial status, Harry’s estrangement from Clara, her drinking problem, John’s reaction to both of these, and much more. When it was over, John felt like he’d just been anatomized with a scalpel made of words and air… and he was completely astounded.

 _All this from walking into a room and handing someone a phone,_ John thought in wonder. “That,” he said, “was amazing.”

The look Sherlock shot him from the far side of the cab’s back seat surprised John again, coming from someone whose website, frontloaded with huge raw certainty and razor-edged scorn, he’d spent so much time reading through last night. Look at the man himself, though, and what you saw was surprise, and gratification tinged with disbelief… even wistfulness. “You think so?”

“Of course it was. It was extraordinary,” John said: “quite extraordinary.”

“That’s not what people normally say.”

“What do they normally say?”

“Piss off.”

John grinned, looked away. Yet just before he did he caught the brief smile on Sherlock’s face: a bit resigned, a bit amused… and there was something else there, as if John’s unexpected admiration was making the “normal reaction” a little easier to bear.

“And since you haven’t said that,” said Sherlock, “one thing more.”

“Which is?”

“When you were shot,” Sherlock said, his voice suddenly going quieter, almost too low to hear over the cab’s engine, “how high were you?”

John’s breath caught. Then he forced himself to let it out as if nothing was going on; but his eyes were narrowed as he said, “I don’t do drugs.”

“Not the kind of high I meant,” said Sherlock, still watching him carefully, like someone looking for some specific sign.

John’s breathing was still giving him trouble, partly due to the utter coolness of those eyes resting on him. _He really does know._ How _does he know? There’s no way it shows_ _—_

The steady gaze of those eyes felt like something keen-edged scraping on his skin. But they revealed nothing: whatever was going on behind them, it kept its own counsel, didn’t show.

John sat quiet a moment more. _‘War hero,’_ he thought. _Naturally I’m not the only one who can use the Internet. I looked him up; he almost certainly looked me up. And some of this is a matter of public record. But he knew_ before. _He was seeing this_ yesterday, _before he’d even left the lab—_

“How could you _possibly_ have known,” John said at last, “that I was fledged?”

“Past tense, doctor?” Sherlock said. “An odd way to put it.”

John shook his head. “Might as well be. I don’t go high any more.” The flatness of his voice would have put most people off the subject fairly quickly; but the man sitting next to him was not most people. _And anyway, I did ask…_

Sherlock had ignored John’s tone and was looking at his shoulders again. “The left shoulder rides a little high and forward when you’re moving, just a few centimeters out of true _—_ though not when you’re at rest and forcing yourself to stand straight. The other shoulder leans back a little to compensate; not so that most people would notice. Not that most people notice anything.” The scorn in his voice was amused. “The shoulder injury alone wouldn’t cause _bilateral_ asymmetrical posture, so you’re obviously suffering from _dyskinesia alata_ secondary to a wing injury. But it’s an atypical form, because somehow you incurred an injury both to your physical body _and_ the wing at the same time. Your body’s reacting to sensory feedback from the damaged nonphysical wing structure as if it was localized physical trauma, even when the wing’s not manifest. And naturally the postural imbalance affects your gait as well: an issue your therapist has been attempting to address. Plainly without much success.”

All John could do was shake his head as Sherlock condensed something like three months’ worth of diagnosis, misdiagnosis and rediagnosis into a few sentences. _And he first laid eyes on me only a day ago._  “Absolutely astonishing,” John said, looking over at Sherlock again.

Sherlock was looking out the cab’s window as they made their way into Brixton. His mouth quirked up just a little. “There are some details I wouldn’t mind having filled in _…_ ”

And then the cab pulled into a little parade of tired-looking houses, some of them boarded up and looking like they’d been squats for a while, others covered with scaffolding and in the process of being gutted and refurnished. “Never mind, it’ll have to wait.”

They got out, and by the time the cab was gone Sherlock’s attention was all for the cluster of police cars and the people milling around ahead of them, on the far side of the blue and white incident tape. As they walked toward it Sherlock said, “Earlier, though: did I get anything wrong?”

John cast his mind back to the business before his wings became an issue. “Harry and me don’t get on,” John said. “Never have.”

“You’re fledged and he’s not.”

John nodded, not entirely surprised that Sherlock would have picked up on that. It was a common enough source of friction inside families, when everyone expected (against all the statistical evidence) that a given family member should fledge out when they reached adulthood, and then never did. No genetic component to fledging had ever been established, but that still never seemed to keep people from treating it as something that _ought_ to run in families.

John sighed. “Clara and Harry split up three months ago, and they’re getting a divorce.” And at the next bit, as always, he grimaced a little. “Harry… is a drinker.”

He was glad that there wasn’t really time to get any further into that issue at the moment. How much of Harry’s substance dependency could actually be laid at John’s door had been a subject of endless midnight arguments and recriminations in the family. It was John’s professional opinion that it took a lot more than mere jealousy of a pair of wings to turn someone into an alcoholic. But the family had kept going for second and third and fifth opinions on this score, and trying to wish some kind of obscure guilt for it onto John, until he’d more or less washed his hands of them and taken himself off to a war zone in search of relative peace and quiet.

“Spot on then,” Sherlock said. “I didn’t expect to be right about everything…”

John had to force himself to keep his face straight, for he’d been holding this particular card against his chest since yesterday. “Harry’s short for ‘Harriet.’”

Sherlock stopped dead, annoyance and chagrin plastered all over his face. “Harry’s your sister.”

“…Now what exactly am I supposed to be doing here?”

Sherlock was oblivious, deep in pique. _“_ Sister _!”_ he hissed.

John paused until Sherlock caught up with him, and they walked toward the cars and the incident tape again. “Seriously, what am I doing?”

“There’s always something!”

A handsome dark young woman in a short skirt and stylish linen jacket was coming up on the other side of the incident tape to meet them. She was quite pretty in a snubnosed sort of way, though John didn’t much care for the look of disdain she was leveling at Sherlock. “Hello, Freak,” she said.

“I’m here to see Detective Inspector Lestrade,” Sherlock said, pausing on the near side of the tape to take his gloves off.

“Why?”

Sherlock turned a look of dry annoyance on her. “I was invited.”

“Why?” she said, as if the mere fact wasn’t anything like good enough for her.

“I think he wants me to take a look.”

“Well, you know what I think _—_ “

“Always, Sally,” Sherlock said. He stepped under the tape, then paused and sniffed. “You didn’t make it home last night.”

She stared at him a second, then reached to John’s presence. “Ah, ah, who’s this?”

“Colleague of mine: Doctor Watson. Doctor Watson, Sergeant Sally Donovan. Old _friend.”_ From the soft-voiced venom Sherlock injected into the word, John was immediately clear that this was a form of Sherlock’s friendship he never wanted to experience personally.

“A colleague,” Donovan said with nasty skepticism. “How do _you_ get a colleague?” She glanced at John. “What, did _he_ follow you home?”

John was annoyed, but this was a crime scene and there were more important things to be thinking about. He glanced at Sherlock. “Would it be better if I just waited?“

“No,” Sherlock said, and lifted the tape for him.

Donovan turned as if he wasn’t worth making a fuss about; John stepped under the tape and followed Sherlock. Near the front of the house, and inside, were various police personnel, including a uniformed constable or two with his or her fledging out; others were either nonfledged people or just not displaying. As they approached the front door, a tallish young man with dark hair and a constipated expression, wearing a disposable blue Tyvek crime scene suit, hurried out toward Sherlock.

“Ah, Anderson,” Sherlock said, “here we are again.”

“It’s a crime scene. I don’t want it contaminated. Are we clear on that?”

“Quite clear. And is your wife away for long?”

Anderson looked disgusted. “Oh, don’t pretend you worked that out, somebody told you that.”

“Your deodorant told me that.”

“My deodorant?”

Sherlock gave him a little smirk. “It’s for men.”

“Well, of course it’s for men! I’m wearing it.”

“So’s Sergeant Donovan.”

John looked sideways and was unsuccessful in completely controlling his smile as Anderson and Donovan exchanged an utterly horrified glance. “Whew!” Sherlock said softly, “I think it just vaporized. May I go in?”

“Now look, whatever you’re trying to imply _—_ ”

“I’m not implying anything,” Sherlock said with an air of utter innocence. “I’m sure Sally came round for a nice little chat and just happened to stay over.” Sherlock headed through the door. “And I assume she scrubbed your floors, going by the state of her knees…!”

Sherlock vanished into the house. John went in after him without comment.

Lestrade met them, also now wearing a crime scene suit. After the briefest of introductions _—_ “he’s with me,” Sherlock said, as if that should be explanation enough _—_ John pulled a suit on himself (Sherlock declined) and followed him and the DI up seemingly endless stairs. “I can give you two minutes _,_ ” said Lestrade.

“May need longer,” Sherlock said.

“Her name is Jennifer Wilson, according to her credit cards: we’re running them now for contact details. Hasn’t been here long _—_ some kids found her.” And shortly the climb up the stairs terminated on a landing from which a door opened into a small, chilly, mold-smelling room in which there lay a corpse.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Casting off:_ to push a falcon or raptor into taking off from the fist by starting the motion of throwing it into the air. A cast is also a pair or group of birds of prey being flown together as a team or pack.


	3. Brailed

Sherlock paused just inside the doorway and slowly put out one gloved hand, fingers spread as if to hold the scene in front of him still and in place while he took it all in. Then he glanced abruptly over at Lestrade, who was standing just the other side of the open door. “Shut up.”

“I didn’t say anything _—_ ”

“You were thinking. It’s annoying.”

Lestrade threw a glance at John as if to say, _And what are_ you _going to do now? Anything annoying or unusual?_

John just looked away and regarded the body for a few moments, frozen by the surreal quality of it all: the glaring lights, the blaring pink of the dead woman’s clothes, the quiet and the chill. Death was his old familiar enemy, and John was often an unwilling companion to dead bodies; but on the battlefield that was only to be expected. To suddenly revisit that somber comradeship in surroundings like these was beyond peculiar.

Sherlock stepped slowly and carefully over to the body, looking down at the word scratched in the rough floorboards by the woman’s left hand. _Rache._ Then he knelt down by her, ran a hand over her coat, fished inside her right-hand pocket and came up with an umbrella, examined this as well. After a few seconds Sherlock slipped it back in place and ran his fingers under her collar; then produced a snap-out pocket magnifier and minutely examined all the jewelry she was wearing _—_ bracelet, earrings, necklace, and finally her rings. He pulled off the outermost one, the wedding ring, eyed it inside and out; slipped it back on her finger.

Then he smiled slightly, stood, pulled the gloves off.

“Got anything?” said Lestrade.

“Not much,” Sherlock said. But John looked at his face, at that slight smile, and thought _Oh really?_

“She’s German,” said Anderson, who had appeared in the doorway and was leaning on the jamb. _“’Rache’_ _—_ German for revenge. She could be trying to tell us that _—_ ”

Sherlock had started walking over to the doorway the moment he started speaking. “Yes, thank you for your input,” he said, not sounding particularly thankful to John, and slammed the door in Anderson’s face.

“So she’s German?” Lestrade said, while John listened to the echoes of the slam fading and considered that Sherlock’s people skills really did need some work. _“Anderson won’t work with me”? I can start to see why…_

“Of course she’s not,” Sherlock said, pulling out his mobile phone, tapping at it, reading what came up. “She’s from out of town, though. Intended to stay for one night before returning home to Cardiff. So far, so obvious.”

“Obvious?” Lestrade said.

“Sorry,” John said, _“obvious?”_

“What about the message?” Lestrade said.

Sherlock looked up at him. “Doctor Watson, what do you think?”

“Of the message?”

“Of the body. You’re a medical man.”

“No, we have a whole team outside!“ said Lestrade.

“They won’t work with me,” Sherlock said.

Lestrade looked put out. “I’m breaking every rule letting _you_ in here…”

“Yes,” Sherlock said, sounding surprisingly patient at the moment, “because you need me.”

He and Lestrade regarded each other for a moment. “Yes I do,” Lestrade said quietly, his gaze falling to the body. “God help me.”

Sherlock looked at John. “Doctor Watson?”

John glanced over at Lestrade.

“Oh, do as he says, help yourself _._ ” And Lestrade headed over the door. “Anderson, keep everyone out for a few minutes.” He stepped out for a moment.

John went over to the body, got down into a half crouch: looked at it, looked at Sherlock. Very quietly he said, “What am I doing here?”

“Helping me make a point,” Sherlock said as quietly.

“I’m supposed to be helping you pay the rent.”

“This is more fun.”

“Fun?” John said. “There’s a woman lying dead.”

“Perfectly sound analysis, Doctor,” Sherlock said, a bit dry, “but I was hoping you’d go deeper.”

Once again John noted that he wasn’t getting the same kind of impatient, brusque reactions that Sherlock routinely doled out to most others. _Interesting… but ask him about it later. If you need to._ As Lestrade came back in, John folded his bad leg under him and got busy.

The challenge here was to get a sense of what had happened in a big hurry and without touching the body more than absolutely necessary, as John wasn’t associated with the forensics team and had no desire to foul their protocols. Speed, fortunately, was no problem: repeatedly doing complex diagnoses while firefights were going on over his head had proven to be excellent training for the art of working fast.

John immediately started checking the things that could be examined most quickly and with least disruption: nail beds (dark and congested where he could catch a glimpse beneath the nails from the underside, the varnish making this a difficult business as usual—but a glance across at the left hand, where the nail varnish had chipped on the finger used to scratch the word on the floor, confirmed this), visible sclerae (petechiae showing), scent (nothing but the acrid scent of chyme and bile lingering about both mouth and nose: aspirate), a quick stroke and palpation at the front of the throat (not swollen, hyoid bone and cricoid cartilage intact as far as he could tell without moving the body more than he thought was appropriate under the circumstances). “Yep,” John finally said, straightening. “Asphyxiation, probably. Passed out, choked on her own vomit. Can’t smell any alcohol on her; could have been a seizure. Possibly even drugs _._ ”

Sherlock looked at him darkly across the body. “You know what it was. You’ve read the papers.”

“What _—_ ” It clicked. “She’s one of the suicides, the fourth _…_ ”

“I said two minutes,” Lestrade said. “We’ll need anything you’ve got.”

Sherlock took a breath as John got back up. “The victim is in her late thirties, a professional person going by her clothes, and something in the media, going by the frankly alarming shade of pink. Traveled from Cardiff today, intending to stay in London for one night; it’s obvious from the size of her suitcase.”

“Suitcase?”

“Suitcase, yes,” Sherlock said, looking keenly around the room. “She’s been married for ten years, but not happily _…_ had a string of lovers. None of them knew she was married.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Lestrade said, “if you’re just making this up _—_!”

“Her wedding ring,” Sherlock said, going back to the body and pointing, “ten years old at least. The rest of her jewelry’s been regularly cleaned, but not her wedding rings. The state of her marriage, right there. The inside of the ring is shinier than the outside; that means it’s regularly removed. The only polishing it gets is when she works it off her finger. So, for her work: she doesn’t work with her hands. So what or rather who _does_ she remove her rings for? Clearly not one lover: she’d never sustain the fiction of being single over that amount of time. So more likely a string of them. Simple.”

John was briefly lost in sheer naked admiration. _This man does what diagnosticians do with patients, with bodies,_ he thought, _but dear God, he does it with_ everything else. “That’s brilliant!”

Sherlock threw one of those looks of surprised appreciation at John again, though with a slightly wry edge. _In front of Lestrade?_ it seemed to say. _He’ll think I put you up to this._ “Sorry,” John said.

“Cardiff?” said Lestrade.

“It’s obvious, isn’t it?”

“It’s not obvious to _m_ _e,”_ said John, looking down at the body again and wondering how he might start learning to see what Sherlock seemed to so effortlessly pick up with a glance or two.

Sherlock was silent a moment in what looked like sheer perplexity. “Dear God, what is it like in your funny little brains? It must be so boring. Her coat!” he said to Lestrade. “It’s slightly damp; she’s been in heavy rain in the last few hours. No rain in London in that time. Under her coat collar is damp too; she’s turned it up against the wind. She’s got an umbrella in her left-hand pocket, but it’s dry and unused. Not just wind: strong wind, too strong to use her umbrella. We know from her suitcase that she was intending to stay overnight, so she must have come a decent distance, but she can’t have travelled more than two or three hours because her coat still hasn’t dried. So: where has there been heavy rain and strong wind within the radius of that travel time?” He held up his phone, showing first Lestrade and then John the web page with the precipitation and wind maps from the Met Office’s website. “Cardiff.”

John shook his head, delighted. “That’s fantastic!”

Sherlock glanced quizzically at John. “Do you know you do that out loud?”

“Sorry,” John said, a bit bemused by this himself: “I’ll shut up.”

“No, it’s… fine.”

“Why do you keep saying ‘suitcase?’” Lestrade said.

“Yes, where is it?” Sherlock said, turning in a whirl of dark coat and staring around the room. “She must have had a phone or an organizer. We’ve got to find out who ‘Rachel’ is.”

“She was writing ‘Rachel?’” said Lestrade, surprised.

“No, she was writing an angry note in German,” Sherlock said, his tone thick with sarcasm, “of _course_ she was writing ‘Rachel’! No other word it can be. Question is, why did she wait till she was dying to write it?”

“How do you know she had a suitcase?” said Lestrade.

“Back of the right leg,” Sherlock said, pointing. “Tiny splash marks on the heel and calf not present on the left. She was dragging her suitcase behind her with her right hand. Don’t get that splash pattern any other way. Smallish case, going by the spread. Case that size, woman this clothes-conscious—could only be an overnight bag, so we know she was staying one night. Now where is it? What have you done with it?”

“There wasn’t a case,” said Lestrade.

John glanced at Lestrade in mild surprise. But Sherlock straightened up from the woman’s body and stared at Lestrade with a sudden look of leashed-in excitement. “Say that again?”

“There was no case. There was never any suitcase.”

Sherlock leapt to his feet and plunged between John and Lestrade to get to the door. “Suitcase!” he shouted down the stairs, himself heading down them fast. “Did anyone find a suitcase? Was there a suitcase in this house?”

They followed him out to the landing. “Sherlock, there was no case!” Lestrade called after him.

Sherlock paused on the stairs. “But they take the poison themselves,” he said, urgent, “they chew, swallow the pills themselves. There are clear signs, even you lot couldn’t miss them!”

John and Lestrade looked over the baluster of the stairs at him. “Yeah, right, thanks,” Lestrade said. _“And?”_

“It’s murder,” Sherlock said from one flight down, pausing to look up at them. “All of them. I don’t know how. But they’re not suicides. They’re killings. Serial killings.” He clapped his hands together in delight, oblivious to the bemused or annoyed looks of Anderson and the others on the next landing down. “We’ve got ourselves a serial killer. I love those, there’s always something to look forward to…!” He dashed around to the next flight of steps.

“Why are you saying that?”

Sherlock paused again. “Her case,” he said, “come on, where is her case? Did she _eat_ it? Someone else was here and they took her case.” He paused, got a seeing-something-far-away look in his eyes. “So the killer must have driven here using a car…”

“She could have checked into a hotel, left her case there _,_ “ John said.

“No, she wouldn’t have gone to the hotel. Look at her hair! She color-coordinates her lipstick and her shoes! She’d never have left any hotel with her hair still looking—”

And Sherlock froze, staring, plainly seeing something that none of the rest of them could. “Ohh,” he said, and once again clapped his hands, this time in front of his face, like a man faced with some truly great realization. _“Ohh!!”_

“Sherlock,” Lestrade said over the baluster, _“what??”_

Sherlock didn’t even seem to notice. “Serial killers are always hard,” Sherlock was saying to himself with obvious relish, “you have to wait for them to make a mistake…”

“We can’t just wait!” Lestrade said.

“No, we’re done waiting,” Sherlock said, already halfway down the stairs. “Look at her, really _look_! Houston, we _have_ a mistake! Get on to Cardiff, find out who Jennifer Wilson’s family and friends are. Find Rachel!”

“Of course, yeah, but _what mistake?!”_ Lestrade hollered down the stairwell at him.

 _“PINK!”_ Sherlock shouted back at him, and charged off down the stairs.

“Let’s get on with it,” Lestrade said to his team, and they started heading into the room where the dead woman lay to process it. John stood there a moment, doing his best to process the inside of his head as regarded what had just happened, and then went limping down the stairs after Sherlock.

***

In the few minutes it took John to get out of the crime scene coverall and make it out the front door, Sherlock had disappeared. _Typical,_ John thought, annoyed. _Just when I finally have a chance to start asking some questions in depth._  But Sherlock had been intent on something much more urgent than John’s wings when he left. _And that’s how it should be. If these really are killings, and he can help stop them, that’s what he should be concentrating on._

He limped back the way they had come, toward the incident tape. Sergeant Donovan was standing there by one of the cars, and as she spotted John coming, she said, “He’s gone.”

“Sherlock Holmes?” John said.

“Yeah, he just took off. He does that.”

“Is he coming back?”

“Didn’t look like it.”

“Right,” John said, now feeling a bit put out. _Strange how that didn’t bother me so much when it seemed no one else had noticed._ “Right,” John said under his breath: “yes.” He turned back to Donovan. “Sorry, where am I?”

“Brixton.”

 _I_ know _I’m in Brixton, you silly cow. I was hoping for something a little more specific._  “Do you know where I could get a cab? It’s just— Uh, well, my leg.”

She picked up the tape for him. “Try the main road.”

“Thanks.” He walked under.

“You’re not his friend,” Donovan said as John passed her.

Something about her slightly snotty certainty got up his nose. _Oh?_ John thought. _Who the hell are_ you _to be so sure?_

“He doesn’t have friends,” she said, dropping the tape as he turned. “So who are you?”

“I’m, I’m nobody,” John said. “I just met him.”

“Take my advice, then. Stay away from that guy.”

 _Don’t recall asking for your advice._ “Why?”

“You know why he’s here?”

John said nothing.

“He’s not paid or anything,” Donovan said. “He likes it. He gets off on it! The weirder the crime, the more he gets off. And you know what? One day for Sherlock it won’t be enough. One day we’ll be standing around a body and Sherlock Holmes will be the one who put it there.”

That struck John as completely unlikely. “And why would he do that?”

“Because he’s a psychopath. Psychopaths get bored.”

John stood quiet, unsure how to even begin replying to such stunning certainty coupled with such a completely daytime-telly concept of psychopathy. Though John’s psych unit during his medical training at Bart’s had been years ago now, he was clear that Sherlock was no psychopath.

“Donovan!” Lestrade shouted.

“Coming!” And she headed back toward the house, She threw a last look at John. “Stay away from Sherlock Holmes.”

John stood there for a moment, not merely at a loss for words, but just briefly at a loss, full stop. _It’d be a little easier to defend you, Sherlock,_ he found himself thinking, _if you hadn’t just buggered off without a word._

_Meanwhile, dammit, here I am…_

John sighed and headed for the high street.

***

Making your way on foot at night, with a dodgy leg, through a part of London that you know to be a bit unsafe in some areas, could have been expected to be a little exciting even under more normal circumstances. But John quickly realized that nothing about today was going to be normal, as ringing phones began to follow him on his walk up to the high street.

They became more insistent as he went, until John’s curiosity finally got the better of him and he ducked into a red phone booth to answer the phone. And when from inside the booth he saw the high-street cameras turn away from him one by one and shut their power lights down, and then the big dark car pulled up at the kerb, John knew things had gone beyond the merely abnormal: he was in deep water. _So, fine. Take a breath. Keep your eyes open and don’t lose your nerve…_

The ensuing ride to some godforsaken and peopleforsaken industrial warehouse was only slightly beguiled by John’s back-seat partner, a beautiful dark-haired woman called (though not really named) Anthea, who just kept texting away like a demon while acting like kidnappings were something in which she calmly assisted every day. John was as courteous to her as he’d normally have been to anyone so lovely when more or less alone with her in a big fancy car: but thoughts of the (very likely armed) driver, and the self-blinding cameras, and the smoothly ominous voice at the other end of the phone he’d answered, kept intruding between him and the woman’s dark English-rose looks.

Then things got even worse when they got where they were going, and John started making his way across the wet floor of a very deserted-looking warehouse, toward the tall, dark auburn-haired man who awaited him. He was elegantly kitted out in a carefully cut charcoal three-piece suit—almost an upper-end parody of a City type, leaning all dapper on a razor-thin umbrella. His features were patrician, his eyes close-set and thoughtful, and his smile deceptively smooth, almost friendly…except when you took into account the look in those eyes, and the man’s wings. Even tidily folded back, they were quite big ones, the softly-feathered and beautifully barred wings of an eagle owl—shadowed in umber and striped in cream, the neatly serried mahogany pinfeathers making the lighter wing-coverts look like some fabulously expensive tweed.

People who casually displayed their fledging on their first meeting with someone always made John wonder just what was going on with them. It wasn’t as if there were hard-and-fast rules in most Western cultures, of course. First-impression wing display could be a sign of personal confidence or of overconfidence, of assertiveness or aggressiveness, or just of someone who’d decided _The hell with it, if the wingless can’t cope with what I am, that’s_ their _problem._ Someone in a situation like _this_ , though—who also let John see his fledging straight off in a situation that had skated well over the line into illegality—was a more serious source of concern. John, however, was damned if he was going to let on how all this was making him feel.

Unfortunately that man’s eyes dwelt on him in an unsettling way that suggested merely trying not to let on might be insufficient. _What the_ hell _have I got myself into now,_ John thought, noting in passing that his pulse was rising.

“Have a seat, John,” said the man in the suit, indicating the waiting chair with the umbrella.

John ignored the chair, being much more concerned with all the junk sitting around in this warehouse and all the cover it potentially offered. “You know, I’ve got a phone,” he said, ambling forward: not rushing, just buying himself a little extra time to assess all this. “And this is very clever and all that—” Was that something moving off to his right? _We’re not alone here._ _Armed backup,_ John thought, sure of it to his bones, though he had no data but that flicker of movement that he hadn’t quite clearly seen. “—but you could just phone me. On m’phone.”

The tall man’s wings roused a little against his back, normally a sign of amusement, and settled again; though John kept his eyes on the man’s face, pretending not to notice. The problem was that fledging was always somewhat diagnostic about the person who wore it. The follow-up question was always whether the identification was conscious, unconscious or subconscious. In any case, here was someone very sleek and posh and urbane-sounding, who was nonetheless wearing huge downy-fletched wings capable of bearing their owner great distances in perfect silence… the approach utterly unsuspected until talons came down with swift certainty on the back of the prey and snapped its neck in two.

“When one is avoiding the attention of Sherlock Holmes,” John’s abductor said, “one learns to be discreet. Hence this place.” He gestured elegantly with his umbrella at their extremely postmodern surroundings: then fixed his regard once more on John. “Your leg must be hurting you. Sit down.”

“I don’t want to sit down.” Especially since sudden movement with little warning was a whole lot easier when you weren’t sitting. John revised his assessment of his situation a few levels deeper into what-the-hell-have-I-got-myself-into territory, for this man was giving him the creeps, and John had long since learned to trust his instincts in such matters.

“You don’t seem very afraid.”

 _Oh, we’re playing_ this _game, are we: ‘Intimidate The Squaddie’._ _Fine._ “You don’t seem very frightening.”

The man laughed at him, a lovely deep posh laugh that fairly oozed supercilious amusement. “Ah, yes, the bravery of the soldier. Bravery is by far the kindest word for stupidity, don’t you think?”

What John thought, in just an image-flash, was something swift and concise concerning the handle of his cane and the man’s larynx. But a second later the conversation changed direction. “What is your connection with Sherlock Holmes?”

John’s eyebrows went up a bit. “I don’t have one. I barely know him. I met him—” Christ, was it so short a time? Somehow the last thirty-six hours seemed to have had a tremendous amount of business packed into them… possibly because they’d been more interesting than anything that had happened to John since, well, since Afghanistan. “Yesterday.”

“Hmm. And since yesterday you’ve moved in with him, and now you’re solving crimes together. Might we expect a happy announcement by the end of the week?”

John blinked at that, annoyed, and became determined not to just stand here and let the man control the conversation. “Who are you?”

“An interested party.”

“Interested in Sherlock. Why? I’m guessing you’re not friends.”

“You’ve met him. How many friends do you imagine he has?” At that, John allowed a slight shift in his expression to show; on the surface, it was a valid point.

“I’m the closest thing to a friend that Sherlock Holmes is capable of having,” John’s abductor said.

John’s glance flickered off to the right again: he kept not-quite-seeing-but-sensing something moving over there. “And what’s that?”

“An enemy.”

 _Christ, we’re well into melodrama territory_ here. “An enemy…”

“In his mind, certainly. If you were to ask him, he’d probably say ‘his arch-enemy’. He does love to be dramatic.”

John glanced out at the dripping, echoing, fluorescent-lit space around them. “Well, thank God you’re above all that.”

The man gave him what John’s mum would once have described as “an old-fashioned Look”. Yet there was something else added to it that John didn’t have time right then to further assess, as his phone chose that moment to chime. He reached into his pocket, brought it out and poked at it until it displayed the text that had just come in.

 

_Baker Street. Come at once if convenient. SH_

 

“I hope I’m not distracting you,” said the man with the umbrella.

As the conversation seemed to have veered into the sarcastic mode, John was quite happy to keep it there. “You’re not distracting me at all.”

“Do you plan to continue your association with Sherlock Holmes?”

“I could be wrong—” John let himself appear to be studying the warehouse wall behind his host, while hoping his peripheral vision might pick up any movement on the sides from someone who’d become incautious— “but I think that’s none of your business.” _Nothing. Damn._

“It could be.”

“It really couldn’t,” John said, shaking his head. _And how do I back that up?_ _How the hell is it that I’m not_ carrying? _Oh, yeah, I remember now: because it didn’t occur to me when I went out to look at a flat that afterwards I was going to be kidnapped. What an interesting day I’m having!_

John’s abductor repositioned his umbrella over his right forearm and reached into his inside jacket pocket: the umbrella swung gently for a moment and brushed the neatly back-folded primaries of the man’s right wing, stirring the feathers’ downy-soft leading edges. Presently he came out with a Moleskine-type notebook and cracked it open. “Well, if you do move into, um—” he peered at the page— “Two Hundred and Twenty-One-B Baker Street—” and you could actually hear the capital letters, along with an apparent disdain for properties that were divided into flats rather than let as a whole house— “I’d be happy to pay you a meaningful sum of money on a regular basis to, ah, ease your way.” He closed the notebook, tucked it back inside his jacket.

John frowned, the issue of his current account’s normally minuscule balance drowned in a split second by cold rage at this man’s assumption that John could be cheaply had—for no matter what kind of sum his abductor was about to offer, John was clear that it would be cheap to him. … _Or that I could be had at_ all. _I don’t care if Sherlock Holmes is secretly Jack the bloody Ripper; I’m not selling him to anybody, least of all_ this _smooth-faced fucker._ “Why?” John said.

“Because you’re not a wealthy man.”

 _So you’ve not only been watching me with your conveniently swivelly security cameras, but you’ve been in my bank records, too. And God knows what else besides. Who the hell_ is _Sherlock Holmes, really, besides what shows up on his website and Google?_ “In exchange for what?”

“Information. Nothing indiscreet. Nothing you’d feel uncomfortable with.” _L_ _ike you have the slightest idea of what that would be!_ “Just tell me what he’s up to.”

“Why?”

Those dark eyes fixed on John’s. “I worry about him,” his abductor said in a tone as soft as it was covertly threatening, _“constantly.”_

“That’s nice of you,” John said politely enough, while declining to accept delivery on the threat and quite happily revisiting the sarcastic side of things.

The tall man let his gaze slip away from John’s; he began fiddling with his umbrella, swinging it up to peer at its tip. “I would prefer for various reasons that my concern go unmentioned. We have what you might call a… difficult relationship.”

John’s phone chimed again. He took it out, thumbed the text window open.

 

_If inconvenient, come anyway. SH_

 

“No,” John said to his abductor, without looking up.

“I haven’t even mentioned a figure.”

“Don’t bother.”

Laughter from the other man, infuriating. “You’re very loyal very quickly.”

 _Like that’s necessarily a failing, you son of a bitch? And if I am: not your business, and you don’t get the satisfaction of hearing me admit it._ “I’m not,” John said. “I’m just not interested.”

The man with the umbrella looked at him with his head tilted back, as if seeing in John’s face confirmation of something he’d been unsure was there. Then he reached into his jacket again, brought out the Moleskine once again. “’Trust issues,’ it says here….” he said, finding a page.

John swallowed, frowned again. “What’s that?”

His abductor studied his little notebook with a disbelieving frown. “Could it be that you’ve decided to trust Sherlock Holmes, of all people?”

“Who says I trust him?”

“You don’t seem the kind to make friends easily _—_ ”

 _Right, that’s it,_ John thought. _That’s bloody well enough for one day on whether or not I’m supposed to be friends with Sherlock Holmes._ “Are we done?” he said.

That dry narrow gaze flicked up from the little book and fastened on John again, sharp and deadly as talons. “You tell me.”

There was a long list of things John could have told the man with the umbrella at that point, but the old habit of being no ruder than he had to be was with him even here. He tilted his head sideways and held his abductor’s eyes for just a few seconds more, intending his gaze to say what his voice would have liked to: then pointedly turned his back on the man and started limping back toward the car.

“I imagine people have already warned you to stay away from him,” said the voice behind him, “but I can see from your left hand that’s not going to happen.”

John stopped dead, shook his head in disbelief, and turned. “My what?”

“Show me,” said the man with the umbrella.

It was strange how anger so cold could seem to boil over, leaving John no longer caring how many guns might be trained on him from the shadows. As the man with the umbrella and the eagle owl’s wings started to approach him, “Just the hand?” John said, holding it up. “Why stop there?”

And in the next second he’d brought his own wings out and flung them to full extension in one swift symmetrical flare. John’s spread was significantly wider and broader than might reasonably have been expected for his size and height, easily eight feet to either side; the secondary feathers came right down to John’s knees, and the wingtip primaries were as long as his arm. Even these days, when he couldn’t always get full extension on the left side any more, people who got a glimpse of John’s fledging—other than the rehab staff up at QVH in Birmingham, who were used to seeing it while working with his shoulder—tended to go wide-eyed when they did.

The man with the umbrella paused for only a second, while John held his eyes and narrowed his own, letting his expression and the angry forward-thrust angle of his wingpoise convey how he was feeling about this interview. But, “Well, now,” said the suave voice, as if not a whit concerned. “Golden eagle. How very _martial.”_

It was infuriating, the cool amusement with which the man eyed and then dismissed the unquestionably sizeable wings overshadowing them both. He hooked the umbrella over his forearm as he came, pausing again only when he was nearly toe to toe with John. “As I was saying: the hand…”

“Don’t,” John said, tight, as his questioner reached for it.

The man raised his eyebrows and gave John a look of near-waggish impatience. John considered briefly how nice it would be to wingsmash that smirking face from both sides. Then he put the hand out, palm down.

The man took it in both of his, touching it with surprising delicacy; then let John’s hand go, spreading his fingers in a “done with this” kind of gesture. “Remarkable.”

“What is?”

John’s abductor turned away, twirling the umbrella as if something had been resolved. “Most people,” he said, “blunder ‘round this city and all they see are streets and shops and cars. When you walk with Sherlock Holmes, you see the battlefield.” He turned back toward John. “You’ve seen it already, haven’t you.”

It wasn’t really a question. “What’s wrong with my hand?” John said.

“You have an intermittent tremor in your left hand. Your therapist thinks it’s post-traumatic stress disorder. She thinks you’re haunted by memories of your military service _._ ”

The rage was getting colder, bubbling harder, at this continued violation of John’s privacy. “Who the _hell_ are you? How do you know that?”

For a flash John caught a glimpse of something completely unexpected in the face of the man with the umbrella: approval. But it sealed over again a second later. “Fire her,” the man said. “She’s got it the wrong way ‘round. You’re under stress right now, and your hand is perfectly steady.” His eyes were not mocking now: there was indeed something else there entirely—a kind of challenge. “You’re not haunted by the war, Doctor Watson. You _miss_ it.”

And the man with the eagle owl’s wings leaned in just a tad toward John, his voice dropping to a near-whisper, but still communicating that peculiar sound of some kind of satisfaction. “Welcome back.”

Then he turned and went strolling off, twirling the umbrella, and John’s phone chimed yet again. “Time to choose a side, Doctor Watson,” the man said, idly stretching out as he went first his left-hand wing, broad-barred and lazy, every feather splaying wide as his fingers had, silently saying “Done with this:” and then, after folding it back, stretching the other, which briefly hid both him and the umbrella away as he turned and vanished behind some industrial racking.

John stood there in silent bemusement, feeling his pulse start to drop, as “Anthea” got out of the car and came toward him, still texting. “I’m to take you home,” she said, not even looking up.

John got his phone out, poked it to see what it had to say for itself.

  


_Could be dangerous. SH_

 

He put the phone away, held up his left hand and looked at it.

Not a twitch. John’s mouth quirked with very dark amusement.

“Address?” said Anthea.

When so many things were suddenly happening to someone to whom nothing ever happened any more, there seemed to be only one answer to that: and the answer also provided a new referent for the word “home”.

“Baker Street,” John said, and sent his wings away for the moment, as they would be awkward in the car. “Two two one B Baker Street. But I need to stop off somewhere first.”

Because if this was the way his life was going to start behaving, crime scenes or no crime scenes, John wasn’t going to leave the Sig home even when he went to the Tesco.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A _brail_ is a leather strap used by falconers to restrain a bird’s wings so that it cannot bate [i.e. try to fly away prematurely when its feet are leashed to its perch, as part of the process of “manning” or taming the bird to fly from the fist]. A bird is normally brailed to prevent it from injuring itself if it panics.


	4. Waiting On

When John got to 221B, it was plain that Sherlock had had no further fits of tidying. The place looked rather as if a bomb had hit it—that is, pretty much as it had looked the day before, except that there seemed to be more paperwork haphazardly piled around. The couch, however, had been cleared off, and Sherlock lay there with his head propped on a pillow, looking a bit like a carved effigy on some very unlikely tomb. As John stepped in Sherlock had just let out a noisy exhalation and now was lying there a bit wide-eyed, flexing an arm and working the fingers of one hand.

“What’re you doing?” John said, pausing in the doorway.

“Nicotine patch,” Sherlock said in an abstracted-sounding voice, pushing up his sleeve for John to see. “Helps me think. Impossible to sustain a smoking habit in London these days. Bad news for brain work…”

“Good news for breathing,” John said as he came in.

“Oh, breathing. Breathing’s boring…”

John looked with some concern at that slender forearm. “Is that… _three_ patches?”

“It’s a three-patch problem.” Sherlock steepled his hands under his chin again, closed his eyes, and went back into carven-effigy mode.

John threw a glance at the window, beginning to wonder—in the wake of his visit to post-industrial territory and his _t_ _ê_ _te-_ _á_ _-t_ _ê_ _te_ with Eagle Owl Man—just who might routinely be watching this place. Then he looked back at Sherlock, from whom there was no sign of any explanation emerging. “Well?”

Nothing.

“You asked me to come,” John said. “I’m assuming it’s important…”

Those oddly changeable eyes, gunmetal-grey in this light, snapped open. “Oh, of course. Can I borrow your phone?”

“My phone?”

“Don’t want to use mine, always a chance that the number will be recognized: it’s on the website…”

“Mrs. Hudson’s got a phone,” John said.

“Yeah, she’s downstairs. I tried shouting, but she didn’t hear.”

“I was the other side of London!” If an edge of annoyance crept into John’s voice there, it was perhaps understandable, for the next phrase should have been, _Being kidnapped!_ But he was beginning to wonder whether in Sherlock’s case the addition would make the slightest difference.

“There was no hurry.”

John rolled his eyes, then dug his phone out. “Here.”

Sherlock apparently couldn’t even be bothered to open his eyes: just held his hand out. John slapped the phone into Sherlock’s palm; then shook his head, turned away. “So this is about the case?”

Sherlock lay with eyes closed and the phone pressed between his palms. “Her case…”

“Her case?”

“Her suitcase, yes, obviously!” Sherlock’s eyes were open now. “The murderer took her suitcase. First big mistake.”

“Okay, he took her case. So?”

Sherlock’s eyes were fixed on something John couldn’t see: a list of possibilities, some unfolding theoretical chain of events. “It’s no use; we’ll have to risk it.” He took a deep breath. “On my desk, there’s a number. I want you to send a text.” He held John’s phone out to him.

John smiled in slight exasperated disbelief. “You brought me here…to send a text.”

“Text, yes, the number on my desk.”

 _I cannot_ believe _this man._ John went over to Sherlock, took the phone from him… then inexplicably started feeling twitchy again, and went to peer out the window.

“What’s wrong?”

John was examining the windows in the buildings across the street, thinking of how many ways there were to hide a surveillance camera in such an environment, a shotgun mike… a sniper rifle. “I just met a friend of yours,” he said.

“A friend?” Sherlock looked shocked.

“An enemy.”

“Oh.” His face relaxed, as if that option was much more believable. “Which one?”

John gave Sherlock a thoughtful look. “Your arch-enemy, according to him.” And the surreal quality of this whole exchange began to pile up on John rather. “Do people _have_ arch-enemies?”

Sherlock threw John a most stagy sidelong look. “Did he offer you money to spy on me?”

“Yes.”

“Did you take it?”

The dryly nonjudgmental way in which the question emerged took John by surprise, left him a touch bemused: a condition which was starting to feel all too familiar. “No.”

“Pity. We could have split the fee. Think it through next time.”

John found himself smiling at that, much against his better judgment. _I’m supposed to be annoyed, here; I have every right to be annoyed. Why am I not annoyed?_  “Who is he?”

“The most dangerous man you’ve ever met, and not my problem right now. On my desk, the number—!”

 _Okay, annoyance returning…_ John went to the desk, found the piece of paper in question. “Jennifer Wilson. That was— Hang on, wasn’t that the dead woman?”

“Yes, that’s not important, just enter the number.”

John started keying it in.

“Are you doing it?”

“Yes.”

“Have you done it?”

“Yes, hang _on—_!”

A moment’s silence. “These words exactly. ‘What happened at Lauriston Gardens? I must have blacked out. Twenty-two Northumberland Street. Please come.’”

John looked at Sherlock. “You blacked out?”

“What? No. No!” Sherlock launched himself off the sofa, stepped up onto and over the coffee table by the couch and went to fetch something from the kitchen. “Type it and send it. Quickly!”

John got on with it, not for the first time wishing his phone-keypad skills were a little more developed. Sherlock hurried back into the sitting room, pulled one of the desk chairs over toward the fireplace, plopped something down on its seat. “Have you sent it? Twenty-two Northumberland Street. Hurry up!”

At the sound of a zipper opening, John looked over his shoulder. There was a pink suitcase, one of the trundle-along-behind-you type, now sitting open on the chair.

“That’s… that’s the pink lady’s case, that’s Jennifer Wilson’s case.”

“Yes,” Sherlock said, now sitting in the green leather chair by the fire, studying it, hands folded. “Obviously.”

John stood there in astounded silence with his mouth a bit open, considering the ramifications.

Without even looking at him, Sherlock let his head loll a little to one side in a gesture of exasperation. “Oh, perhaps I should mention—” an annoyed glance at John— _“I_ didn’t kill her.”

“I never said you did.”

“Why not? Given the text I just had you send, and the fact that I have her case, it’s a perfectly logical assumption.” He looked up at John, and there was that expression of challenge again.

John didn’t deal with the question directly for a second, as he was busy being surprised by the answer with which the back of his brain had immediately provided him: _Because I trust you._ “…Do people usually assume you’re the murderer?” he said.

After a second, Sherlock gave John half a smile. “Now and then, yes,” he said, boosting himself up on the low back of his chair and planting his feet on the cushion in front of him.

“…Okay,” John said, and went to sit in the chair opposite. “How did you find this?”

“The same way I found your wings,” Sherlock said. “By looking,”

Now _there_ was a subject on which John greatly desired some clarification… but this wasn’t the moment. _My fledging’s one thing: four dead people are something else entirely. And what if there’s about to be a fifth?_ “Where?”

“The killer must have driven her to Lauriston Gardens,” Sherlock said. “He could only keep her case by accident if it was in the car. Nobody could be seen with this case without drawing attention to themselves, particularly a man, which is statistically more likely. So obviously he’d feel compelled to get rid of it the moment he realized he still had it. It wouldn’t have taken him more than five minutes to realize his mistake. …So I checked every back street within five minutes’ drive from Lauriston Gardens, and anywhere he could dispose of a bulky object without being observed. Took me less than an hour to find the right skip.”

“Pink,” John said softly, astonished all over again. “You got all that because you realized the case had been pink.”

“Well, it had to be pink. Obviously.”

“Why didn’t I think of that?” John said in amused irony.

“Because you’re an idiot.”

Flicked on the raw, John shot Sherlock an indignant look. _All right,_ he thought then, _here’s some of the snark at last. Wasn’t_ that _a short honeymoon._

“No, no, no, don’t take it like that, practically everyone is,” Sherlock said; and his expression genuinely had no particular scorn about it. It was resigned, even a bit kindly; though his version of kindness would have looked like scorn on anyone else. Sherlock’s glance went back to the case, his hands folded with the index fingers steepled: with them he pointed. “Now _look_. Do you see what’s missing?”

“From the case? How could I?”

“Her phone!” Sherlock spread his hands, an exasperated gesture. “Where’s her mobile phone? There’s no phone on the body; there’s no phone in the case. We know she had one; that’s her number there, you just texted it—”

“Maybe she left it at home.”

Sherlock shook his head, sat back down properly in the chair again. “She has a string of lovers and she’s careful about it. She never leaves her phone at home.” Now that glance went back to John, as if Sherlock was waiting to see whether he’d get to the next step in the deductive chain, and how long it’d take him.

“No phone…” John said under his breath. And then he stared at his own phone in sudden suspicious comprehension. “Why did I just send that text?”

Sherlock gave John a look that was almost sly. “Well, the question is, where is her phone _now?”_

“She could have lost it.”

“Yes, or—?”

The hair stood up on the back of John’s neck again. “The murderer. You think the murderer has it.”

“Maybe,” Sherlock said, “she left it when she left her case. Maybe he took it from her for some reason. Either way, the balance of probability is that the murderer has her phone.”

“Sorry,” John said, considerably disquieted. “Did I just text a murderer? What good will that do?”

“We’ll know presently,” Sherlock said. “Meantime, we have unfinished business.” He lifted both hands in front of him and spread them out flat with the palms toward John, wiggling the fingers slightly. “Let’s have a look.”

John stared at Sherlock for a second, then let out a breath of incredulous laughter. _Was I seriously expecting any kind of_ manners _from this man?_ But after what he’d seen in Lauriston Gardens, expecting correct fledge-etiquette from Sherlock was always going to be a nonstarter when even the common-or-garden-variety of courtesy fell so routinely by his personal wayside. _Anyway, like he said, you have questions. And besides, sooner or later he’d see them; it’s not like you’d live here and_ never _display…_

So John stood up, tilted his head sideways and brought his wings real, folded up neatly behind him.

Sherlock got to his feet too and slowly walked around beside John, standing there for a moment and looking across over the wings’ back coverts. John took a step forward so that he was in front of the mirror—partly so as not to seem as if he was being purposely obstructive, and partly so that he could use the mirror to see what Sherlock was doing.

For a second Sherlock didn’t move. Then he looked up and met John’s eyes in the mirror. ”May I?”

John was a little surprised: seemed as if the man had at least _that_ much courtesy in him. “Go on,” John said.

Sherlock reached up and laid his right hand carefully on the leading edge of the left wing just above John’s shoulder, where the tertiary coverts covered the curve between the scapulopectoral root and the wing’s high point when folded, the “false elbow.” John twitched just once at the touch. _This is so odd…_

But he settled down a second later, finding Sherlock’s touch was in its way as clinical as that of any of the staff up at QVH. With his other hand Sherlock lightly took hold of the leading edge just under the false elbow, where the color and thickness of the tertiary covert feathers changed from their normal bronze-gold to a paler gold in a ragged splatter-patch about a handbreadth wide. Sherlock very carefully slipped two fingers in under the coverts, lifting the paler feathers a bit but not actually touching the scar tissue underneath; then pulled that hand away.

“Perhaps some extension, Doctor?” he said.

John raised his eyebrows and stepped away from Sherlock into the middle of the room, staying in line with the mirror. Then, with some care—because he didn’t want to start knocking things over—John slowly stretched his wings out to full extension, and was a bit surprised when the left wing’s virtual _extensor ali_ muscles didn’t give him trouble for the moment: the wing stretched right out.

Sherlock stood watching this process critically, his arms folded. At this point John found himself appreciating the flat even more, for there was actually _room_ to spread right out here, from the sofa wall to the fireplace wall, and still have a little room left over. _No chance of doing this in the bedsit…_

Sherlock took a step or two back past the side of John’s chair to take the whole wingspan in, and John watched him in the mirror, trying to view his spread as dispassionately as Sherlock was doing. It wasn’t easy, though, as John had to admit he took some pride in the way his fledging looked. The tertiary and secondary coverts were a deep chocolate-gold, the uppermost layer of tertiaries at the wing’s leading edge sheened over with the more golden-blond color that John’s hair had been when he was younger and just fledged out. The secondaries nearest the ends of the wings were more of a chocolaty bronze, barred in a lighter bronze-gold, compared to the burnt-chestnut brown with bronze barring of those closer to his body. But the most striking color contrast in the wings lay toward their ends, with the primaries. They were John’s darkest feathers, a profoundly deep mahogany-brown just a shade away from ebony on their dorsal sides, a deep rich dark gold on the ventral. And they were his biggest, every one of them at least six inches wide and tapering to no less than two inches at the blunt tips.

Sherlock nodded and walked over toward the couch, apparently intending to dodge around the end of the right wing. John just shrugged it up out of the way, and Sherlock ducked under and had a look at the ventral side of the wings. There the undersides of the secondaries had long since lost any trace of juvenile white flashing, and the contrasts and colors were a bit less striking; except for the pale golden patch on the inside of the false elbow, where the feathers grown in over the scar betrayed the damage to the underlying tissue.

 _What’s he thinking, I wonder._ John had already seen the unusual leaps of reasoning Sherlock’s mind made across improbable gaps: God only knew what he was deducing from what he saw. And John had other reasons to be a bit unsettled, for what he was doing right now was unusual.

Right from when he’d first fledged out at nineteen, John hadn’t liked to display among unfledged people: it had seemed to him somehow to be as rude as eating in front of the hungry. His family, when he was at home, had been the only exception to the rule—he didn’t mind them seeing or touching his wings until the trouble with Harry started. Then, after uni, had come the Army, and there one displayed when duty required it, at work or in action; or among fledged comrades and fellow professionals, when the spirit moved or the occasion seemed to call for it. And of course keeping company with other fledged people sometimes meant intimate company, and wingplay was routinely part of that.

There too John had tended toward caution, keeping his sex life pretty much strictly among fledged people. It was partly just self-preservation: accidentally getting emotionally involved with someone who later turned out to hate “fledgies” was usually a disaster. But there were also wingless people who were a little too interested in fledged people because they were fascinated by the concept of wings as a potential sex toy.

Having met his share of both the haters and the creepy prurient featherchasers over time, both male and female, John had learned to spot them within minutes of meeting them. When he could, he simply got himself out of range: and for those times when he couldn’t, John had a pre-prepared and very gentle speech that was carefully crafted to let the inattentive listener think he was somehow otherwise spoken for. The lie always bothered him a little, during those periods when it wasn’t actually true. But about certain aspects of his private life, John was adamant. _I am not going to be_ anybody’s _one-night kink._

At any rate, since he’d been invalided home the only people who had touched his wings were the physio team John worked with every couple of weeks; and that touch was as detached and professional as he expected it to be. _So it wouldn’t be a surprise if this felt a little invasive by comparison,_ John thought. But despite the sense of intimacy lent by the firelight, the subdued lighting and the relatively close quarters, John was now finding himself surprisingly untroubled… possibly because Sherlock’s approach to John’s fledging was very much akin to the approach he’d taken to the body on the floor of that small cold room in Lauriston Gardens: quick, cool and impersonal. For the moment Sherlock was seeing John strictly as evidence, and that was just fine with John.

After a few moments more, when he straightened up from examining the left-hand secondaries and their inner coverts and once more met John’s gaze, Sherlock’s expression was as dry as if he’d been reading a newspaper. “You work out regularly,” he said.

John nodded. “Physio, after the injury. The normal daily stretches, and a heavy session up at QVH every ten days or two weeks. Not much choice if you want to get function back, or keep whatever you’ve got back already.”

“Not just that, though,” Sherlock said, standing with hands on hips and once again regarding the disruption and discoloration of the covert feathers near the wrist. “Mind work too.”

John shrugged, both wings and shoulders. “The mind’s where the wings are rooted, after all. They won’t heal till it does… _if_ it does. You still have to work in both modes, anyway, if you don’t want atrophy to set in.” He shrugged again. “The usual stuff. Guided best-case imagery, situational envisioning.”

Sherlock nodded, met John’s eyes. “Thank you,” he said, and sat down in his chair again, folded himself up knees-to-chest. John folded the wings out of the way, then went to settle himself again in the chair on the other side of the fire. Comfortable though the chair was, it took a few moments for John to find the best way to sit in it when winged out. Finally he half-folded the wingbacks into a cushion between him and the back of the chair, then let the primaries drape down over the arms to either side. And then, despite the strangeness of the day and the tension of the moment, John had to just lean back, sigh, and close his eyes for a moment with the simple comfort of it. The bedsit hadn’t ever really felt comfortable to him, and John could have counted on the fingers of one hand the times he’d felt like spreading his wings there beyond the mandatory daily stretches.

When he opened his eyes again, he saw Sherlock looking at him bright-eyed and impatient. “So,” Sherlock said. “You told me about your sister.” There was still a hiss of annoyance around the last word, and John had to restrain a smile. “Will you tell me the rest?”

“The rest of what?”

Sherlock rolled his eyes.“Other than that between twelve and fourteen months ago you were shot during enemy action with a mid-calibre hybrid low-and-High weapon,” he said, “and that you subsequently fell from a height onto a rammed-earth surface having just saved two men’s lives under circumstances that caused you to be ‘mentioned in dispatches’ for your courage under fire and awarded the Military Cross and the Distinguished Service Cross with Bar, I know nothing whatsoever about what happened to you.” Sherlock looked profoundly annoyed. “So perhaps you’d indulge me by filling in the gaps.”

John opened his mouth, then shut it again. “Seriously, Sherlock,” he said, “that’s just astonishing.”

Sherlock once more produced that understated expression of unexpected but fully deserved satisfaction, with just an added edge of smile. “…Any time now, John.”

John nodded, and tilted his head away from Sherlock to gaze into the fire for a few moments. “I was based at Camp Bastion, near Lashkar Gah in the middle of Helmand Province,” he said at last. “It’s just a giant hospital, really: state of the art, purpose-built—busiest field hospital in the world, with all the support you need for a place like that when it’s all by itself out in the middle of nowhere and completely surrounded by hostiles.” John had to stop and swallow, his mouth feeling a bit dry: in recent months he hadn’t had to deal with many people who didn’t already know all about what had happened to him. “Besides handling acute med-surg and post-surgical support for almost all the NATO and ISAF personnel in-country, we did most of the medevac too. Any hour of the day when you weren’t actually scrubbed and in surgery, you might wind up in a Cougar chopper heading for some other base, or some other middle-of-nowhere, to evacuate wounded.”

John swallowed again, licked his lips; a habit he’d picked up when out on maneuvers in that dry, dry place. “I was on the evac rota when we were scrambled over to Maywand: a firefight had broken out in the outskirts—a Taliban ambush for a PRT group who’d been out doing maintenance work on the old canal system the Yanks built in the fifties. The Talibs had pulled the usual stunt—IED in the middle of the road, blow up the front vehicle of a convoy, blow up the back one when it stalls, start picking off the vehicles and people in between. The Marines went in first and neutralized the Taliban: then we went in to do triage, make pickup on the worst wounded, get them stable and get them out. But as we were heading out of Maywand, more Taliban were waiting for us with RPGs and Stingers. They hit our Cougar—”

Sherlock said nothing, just sat with his hands steepled again, listening with silent interest. “There were six men in the chopper. Pilot, copilot, me and my mate Dave Murray: orthopedic surgeon, a good one. And our patients: two Marines, one traumatic amputation mid-femur, one sucking chest wound and abdominal trauma. Both bad, but they both could make it if we could get them back.” One more swallow. “An RPG caught us in the tail rotor first; the Stinger got the main one. Only the pilot and I were fledged, and he was busy. We were spinning down, but we all knew that it wouldn’t—” John cleared his throat. “Dave unstrapped our patients from the stretchers, shoved his patient at me, shoved mine at me, I went out the door with one under each arm and went high. Then the second Stinger hit and the Cougar blew up.”

John stared at the carpet, not seeing it. Instead he was again seeing the ground rushing up at him, a patchwork cityscape, gridded roads and clustered walled compounds and squarish buildings, as he dropped toward them like a rock—his arm muscles afire and spasming with the awful weights they gripped to him, his shoulders feeling like they were being pulled right out of their sockets. Once again John could feel the awful strain of mind and muscle as he beat and beat his pinions against the weakly resisting air, thrashing and working desperately to slow the fall, his wings arching deep as they worked and the secondaries maximally cupped and interbarbed to brake—

“A considerable burden,” Sherlock said, quiet-voiced, but cool, detached. “Exceeding what even an alate in best training might have been expected to manage.”

“Oh, I was in best training,” John said. “In the Army, everyone you met would think it, if they didn’t say it. Though lots did. ‘Little bloke, big wings, fine—but do you fly big too, or just make a wide display?’” His mouth twitched toward an ironic smile. “But that day? Hysterical strength. I was motivated.”

 _…for they were only a few hundred feet up, he could do this if he just didn’t give up, he could get these men down, he_ could _, and they would all live. And there was a flat-topped apartment building just off to the left pushing up toward him, perfect, he swerved and aimed for it, almost safe,_ almost _, as it rushed closer—_

John shook his head in an attempt to put the visual memory aside. “Almost. I almost did it. The wind was gusting, it pushed me sideways. I pushed back, got most of the way over, almost down. But then _—_ ”

 _…then came the stunning blow in his left wing and shoulder, as if he’d been struck by a hammer of fire. The pain made him lose his grip and drop his burden barely twenty feet above the edge of the swiftly-approaching rooftop just as the noise of the shot belatedly arrived. The force of it, with his patients’ extra weight released, then finished kicking him savagely sideways… but not onto the roof. There was no roof left, and nothing under him but the road a hundred feet or more below. John tried to throw his wings out again as the dusty street full of cars and people flew up to meet him. The right wing answered him and got air under it, and maybe the left one did too, but he never knew for sure: the searing white pain that ran down it when it spread nearly blacked him out. Not quite, though. Not quite enough to spare him the last awful seconds, the uprushing rammed-earth road, the staring faces and hurried motion as things and people fled his swiftly growing shadow, and then the whole hard world smashing him sideways into darkness_ —

John looked up and away, refusing to wipe away the sweat that had sprung out on his face.

“The shot caught you from the side as you were maneuvering,” Sherlock said, almost as if he hadn’t seen: his interest for the moment was elsewhere, on John’s left wing. “The pinion had to have been in half-fold behind your back for you to take a through-and-through injury like that. It was your back the shooter was aiming for: the wing was an accident.“

“It saved me from having half my back and a lot of my front blown away,” John said. “The wing slowed the bullet enough that the clavicle stopped it after it punched through the scapula.”

Sherlock nodded. “Interesting that the shooter was using H-capable ammunition. He couldn’t have hit the wing otherwise.” Sherlock eyed the pale blond feathers above the wing’s scar. “Two two five calibre?”

John nodded. “You know a lot about this.”

Sherlock shrugged. “Weaponry’s a necessary area of expertise for me. Along with how it’s used.”

“Over there,” John said, “both sides tend to be using hybrid rounds most of the time. Nobody’s got time to waste loading up situation-specific ammo when a target presents itself.”

“Then,” Sherlock said, “after the surgery, repatriation to Queen Victoria Hospital in Birmingham…”

John nodded—then jumped as, underneath his left wing, on the side table, his phone shrilled.

John’s eyes went wide. He lifted the wing, picked the phone up.

 

_(NUMBER WITHHELD)_   


_CALLING_

 

He looked at Sherlock in shock.

“Three hours after his last victim,” Sherlock said softly, his gaze locking with John’s, intense, “he now receives a text that can only be from her. If somebody just found a phone with a text like that, they’d ignore it. But the murderer…”

The phone stopped ringing.

“Would panic!” Sherlock said, and slapped the lid of the suitcase shut in triumph. He leapt out of his chair and pulled on his jacket.

“Have you talked to the police?” John said, alarmed.

“Four people are dead. There isn’t time to talk to the police.”

“So why are you talking to _me?”_

Sherlock pulled his coat down. “Mrs. Hudson took my skull!” he said, and for just that moment he sounded more like a wistfully pouty child than an excited consulting detective. _However one of those normally sounds,_ John thought. _If normal even gets a look-in here._

“So I’m basically filling in for your skull,” John said.

“Relax, you’re doing fine.” A smile. “Well?”

“Well _what?”_

Sherlock had slipped into that big dark dramatic coat and was wrapping his scarf around his neck. “Well, you could just sit there and…” He wrinkled his nose disdainfully. “Watch telly…”

“You want me to come with you?”

“Well, I like company when I go out. And I think better when I talk aloud… and the skull just attracts attention.”

 _Oh, well,_ that’s _all right then; I’m doing at least as well as somebody’s previously-owned empty cranium._ John grinned in annoyed disbelief, and for a moment couldn’t find anything to say that he wouldn’t later be embarrassed to own up to if called on it.

“Problem?”

“Yeah,” John said. “Sergeant Donovan.”

“What about her?”

“She said you get off on this. You enjoy it.”

Sherlock wouldn’t quite meet John’s eyes for a moment: but a small smile grew on his face regardless. “And I said ‘dangerous,’” he said, “and here you are.”

He headed out the door.

 _“…Damn_ it!” John said. It was perceptive, and it was manipulative, and it was infuriating… and it was _true._ And John wasn’t sure whether he was swearing at Sherlock, for jerking him around this way, or at himself, for finding it somehow irresistible.

He levered himself out of the comfy chair, grabbed the cane, and went after Sherlock in a rush.

***

John found it hard to stay annoyed, though. The night was clear and pleasantly crisp, and it actually _was_ good to be out in company, especially when it didn’t seem like another kidnapping was on the cards. And there was a strangely contagious quality about Sherlock’s energy when it kicked in like this and he went striding along intent as some exotic dark-pelted tracking beast—an utterly different being from the languid carved-effigy creature of less than an hour before. Maybe it was because the adrenaline from his early-evening detour was still flowing a little, but John was finding it easier to keep up with Sherlock now. _Or maybe I’m just getting used to the pace…_

“So where are we going?”

“Northumberland Street. It’s a five minute walk from here.”

“You think he’s stupid enough to go there?”

“Nooo, I think he’s _brilliant_ enough,” said Sherlock, with a note of dark admiration in his voice. “I love the brilliant ones! They’re always so desperate to get caught.”

“But why?”

“Appreciation! Applause. At long last a spotlight. The frailty of genius, John. It needs an audience…”

“Yeah,” John said. _I’ve noticed._

“This is his hunting ground,” Sherlock said, “right here in the heart of the city. Now that we know his victims were abducted, that changes everything. And all of his victims disappeared from busy streets, crowded places, and nobody saw them go. _Think!”_ he said, urgent, and the word wasn’t halfway to a taunt, as such exclamations had been at Lauriston Gardens: it was an exhortation to himself as well as to John. “Who passes unnoticed wherever they go? Who hunts in the middle of a crowd?”

John shook his head. “I don’t know. Who?”

Sherlock shook his head. “…Haven’t the faintest,” he said after a moment. “Hungry?”

Only a couple of minutes later they were turning in through the doorway of a small, sleek-looking Italian restaurant. A young man handling the menus up front waved them toward a booth-table in the front window, plucked a RESERVED sign off it. “Thank you, Billy,” Sherlock said, and sat himself down to the side where he could watch the street outside. “Twenty-two Northumberland Street,” he said, “keep your eyes on it…”

John sat down with his back to the window, pulled his coat off. “He isn’t going to go up and ring the doorbell, is he? He’d have to be mad.”

“He has killed four people,” Sherlock said, already intent on the street.

“Yeah, okay…”

A few seconds later, a big man with long dark hair pulled back came up from the back of the restaurant to greet them. He reached out to shake Sherlock’s hand warmly. “Sherlock! Anything on the menu, whatever you want, free, on the house! For you _and_ for your date.”

“Do you want to eat?” Sherlock said to John.

“I’m not his date,” John said, a bit taken aback.

This news seemed not to sink in terribly far. “This man got me off a murder charge!”

“This is Angelo,” Sherlock said, and John shook the proffered hand. “Three years ago I was able to prove to Lestrade at the time of a particularly vicious triple murder that Angelo was in a completely different part of town, housebreaking.”

“He cleared my name!” Angelo said.

“I cleared it a bit,” said Sherlock, in what struck John as the first sign of any modesty he’d seen Sherlock produce since they’d met. “Anything happening opposite?”

“Nothing.” Angelo turned to John again. “But for this man, I’d have gone to prison!”

“You _did_ go to prison,” Sherlock said.

“I’ll get a candle for the table,” Angelo said, cheerfully oblivious. “It’s more romantic.”

“I’m not his date!” John said. Too late: Angelo was away.

Sherlock put his menu aside. “You may as well eat,” he said. “We may have a long wait.”

John started looking over the menu as Angelo reappeared with the candle and gave him a good-natured if misdirected thumbs-up. “Thanks,” John said, and sighed.

He wound up ordering a small veal scallopine, something he wouldn’t feel too guilty about abandoning if they had to move in a hurry. Sherlock didn’t take his eyes off the street for more than a few moments at a time, and at that point John didn’t feel inclined to try to make conversation, for fear of risking of breaking some train of thought that might eventually turn out to be important. When his food arrived, though, Sherlock was leaning against the cushion of the banquette and looking momentarily a bit less intent. John had been going over the early evening’s events in his mind, and after a few bites of the veal he said, “People don’t have arch-enemies.”

“Sorry?” Sherlock said, having once more been distracted by something going on out in the street.

“In real life,” John said. “There are no arch-enemies in real life. Doesn’t happen.”

“Doesn’t it? Sounds a bit dull.”

“So what did I meet?” John said.

No direct answer came back. “What do real people have, then, in their real lives?” There was some slight scorn in the way Sherlock said “real”; and for the first time in a while he met John’s eyes.

“Friends,” John said. “People they know, people they like, people they don’t like. Girlfriends, boyfriends…”

“Well, as I was saying,” Sherlock said, “dull.” His attention was back on the street again.

“You don’t have a girlfriend, then.”

“Girlfriend, no,” Sherlock said, “not really my area.”

“Mmf,” John said, finishing the previous bite of veal. But then what he’d heard caught up with him and pulled the top off a whole new can of worms… an issue that normally would have been at least in the top third of the stack of Potential Flatmate Issues, but which the more unusual events of the last day or so had knocked completely out of the pile. “Oh, right,” John said, suddenly realizing he needed to feel his way along here a little. “D’you have a boyfriend?” And Sherlock was suddenly looking at him sharply. “Which is fine, by the way—”

That gaze was locked on his. “I know it’s fine.”

John smiled a rather reflexive smile. “So you’ve got a boyfriend?”

“No.”

“Right. Okay.” That pale gaze was still locked on, and John was suddenly forced to resist the urge to squirm a bit. “You’re unattached. —Just like me,” he added in an attempt to sound casual, but the words somehow came out making him sound, in his own ears at least, way too needy: embarrassingly so. He broke the gaze, cleared his throat. “Fine. Good.”

He could still feel Sherlock’s eyes on him as he turned his own attention back to the veal. _Nice veal, very nice veal,_ John was thinking, _say_ something _so you won’t sound like a_ complete _berk, you could mention how good the food is because it really_ is _quite_ —

“John, um… “

It was unusual to hear something so like uncertainty from the man sitting next to him. John glanced over at Sherlock again. “I think you should know that I consider myself married to my work, and while I’m flattered by your interest, I’m really not looking for any—”

Something in the back of John’s head started laughing, grimly, even a little bitterly. This was Sherlock’s version of the sorry-no-thanks-it-just-won’t-work-out speech that John kept ready for the featherchasers, in the event that somehow or other he got outed as fledged in a crowd of wingfrees on the pull. _Oh God, have I already screwed this up?_ John thought. _Is he thinking I fancy him?_ As if he’d be interested in such damaged goods (whispered the back of John’s mind) when with looks like his Sherlock could pull anyone he fancied in a matter of minutes. _And my name’s not even on the lease yet!_  “No,” John said, shaking his head and trying to sound casual about all this, “no, I’m not asking— _No._ ”

Sherlock was just watching him, quite still. “I’m just saying,” John said, “it’s all fine.”

“Good,” Sherlock said after a moment. “…Thank you.” But a strange, subdued sidelong look at John followed the words, so that John wondered briefly if there was something he’d missed.

But “briefly” turned out to be about five seconds long. “Look across the street,” Sherlock said. “Taxi.”

John half-turned in his seat, and the tension of moments before ran out of him like water, starting to be replaced by something else entirely. A black cab had pulled up outside number twenty-two and was idling there, the backseat passenger glancing around uneasily.

“Stopped,” Sherlock said. “Nobody getting in, nobody getting out. Why a taxi?”

John felt his pulse starting to speed up, beating in his ears. _Deduction,_ he thought. _Seemed such an abstract thing. Until now—_

Sherlock’s attention was locked on the cab like a sighting laser. “Oh, that’s clever. Is it clever? _Why_ is it clever?”

—because this, _this_ wasn’t conjecture by the fireside any more, however narrowly reasoned and elegant it might have been. This was something that had come real, out of the abstract and into the concrete. John had been with Sherlock for every step of the logic chain from Lauriston Gardens on; his own phone had sent the text, his own phone had rung with the return call. And now here was the rest of the response, sitting there darkly shining under the streetlights, ominous and still, right across the street from them: _death._ A murder about to happen, if someone didn’t do something about it.

“That’s him?” John said softly. His pulse kept gathering speed as the cab sat there, idling; and the proximal cause of the rise in his heart rate was completely familiar. It had always all been about saving life, for John. Paradoxical as it might originally have seemed to go into the Army to save lives, that was the road he’d taken to his goal. He’d never really expected the dividend of endless excitement he’d found along the way—the addictive adrenaline burn that came with wrestling the dark angel again and again on the field of battle, or in the operating theatre—but it had proven quite habit-forming. And now here it was again…

“Don’t stare.”

…a life on the edge of being ended, and was he going to just sit here and let it happen?

 _“You’re_ staring.”

“We can’t both stare.” And with that Sherlock was on his feet, eyes glittering in the streetlight that shone through the window; was grabbing his coat, was halfway to the door. As quick to see the threat, just a shade quicker to act—

Out there, shadowy and gleaming, there was the dark angel in urban guise, waiting for him and his comrade on the battlefield. Suddenly this was enemy action, utterly familiar territory full of memories and certainty, the place where John Watson knew _exactly_ what to do. And what you did _not_ do was let a fellow fighter take the fight to the enemy without someone to watch his back.

John snatched up his coat and ran out after the one who’d seen this battlefield first; the one who’d shown him the way.

***

In the back seat of the cab across the street, a pale face looked at them out through the rear window. Then the cab pulled away. Sherlock hurled himself after it, and in his eagerness almost didn’t see the car coming toward him from the left; just managed to spring upward and over, boosting himself up enough to roll over its bonnet and off the far side. By the time he’d recovered himself and pelted halfway down the street, though, the cab was well ahead of them, turning a corner.

John skidded to a stop. “I’ve got the cab number!”

“Good for you,” Sherlock said, and closed his eyes, lifting his hands to his head. At first John thought he’d been hurt in the plunge over the car’s bonnet, but that wasn’t it. “Right turn, one way, road work, traffic lights, crossway, pedestrian crossing, left-hand-only traffic lights—” John realized that Sherlock was looking at a map in his head, pathfinding, solving for another route: a way for two men on foot to beat a cab driving through the middle of Soho.

Without another word he dashed down the road and hung a sudden right into an alley. John paced him at speed, apologizing second-hand to the people Sherlock crashed into, and followed him full tilt up a building’s flights of stairs, regular ones first and then spiral stairs that hammered and rang under their footfalls. A shout of “Come on, John!” floated echoing back to him as they came out on top among a nest of interlocked ramps and rooftops where the buildings adjoined or crowded close together. Sherlock was pounding and scrambling across the rooftops, yards ahead of John, but John was catching up with him, following over small jumps between eave and eave.

Under the cloudless night sky they ducked and wove among squat roof structures and scaffolding, dodging in and out through flashes of moonlight that showed between the buildings’ superstructures and hid itself again. It was total madness, but John didn’t care. His pulse suddenly wasn’t just a heartbeat but a backbeat, and his blood was singing with the crazy excitement; every gasp had gracenotes of laughter trying to bubble up through it from underneath. _Haven’t had this much fun since the last time I got shot at! …Well, all right, the time_ before _that—_

They kept going, Sherlock plainly as sure of his way as if the route was printed out or onscreen in front of him. In his wake John found himself scrambling up shifting roofslates and grabbing old cast-iron piping or new copper soffit to pull himself upward or stop a slide downward. Then not too far ahead he saw Sherlock’s coat flare out around and behind him as he threw himself in a truly ridiculous leap across a wide gap yawning between them and the next graveled, moonlight-silvered rooftop. John saw what was coming, skidded, hesitating.

“Come on, John, we’re losing him!” Still running, Sherlock threw a look over his shoulder to see what was keeping John—

John swore, backed up a few steps, jerked his neck a little sideways in the old quick spread-‘em gesture, and then ran and took the jump onto a surface over which suddenly lay a single broad stripe of shadow. It didn’t matter; John knew where he’d be landing with the extra lift, and he saw the ragged-edged shadow-stripe briefly eclipse the dark shape he followed. Then John’s boots hit the gravel, and a second later the shadow vanished and the moonlight came out again in Sherlock’s eyes when he glanced back at John. A breath later John was scrambling down after him through the yawning dark oblong of a yanked-open rooftop door, down the staircase, out onto a landing, down again.

In moments they were at street level once more. It was far easier to make good time on the flat, and they hared off down the road, John getting his directions mixed up once or twice as they ran down a zigzagging series of little courts and alleys too small to be streets.

And then came plunging out of the last of these, right into the bonnet of the cab itself. Sherlock reached into a pocket and held up a badge folder, shouting, “Police, open up!”

He yanked open the left rear door, stared in—and then straightened with a disappointed look. “No,” he said, gasping for air.

John stared. Sherlock, though, was looking with disappointment at the passenger. “Teeth, tan…what, Californian?” He glanced at the man’s valise, on the cab floor in front of him. “L.A. Santa Monica. Just arrived.”

“How can you possibly know that?” John said, panting.

“The luggage!” Sherlock turned to the very tan and white-toothed man in the back seat. “Probably your first trip to London, right? Going by your final destination and the route the cabbie was taking you… “

“Sorry,” said the gent from Santa Monica, “but are you guys the police?”

“Yeah,” Sherlock said, flashing the ID again. “Everything all right?”

“Uh, yeah.”

Sherlock nodded at him. “Welcome to London,” he said, and walked off.

…Leaving John standing there to improvise. “Uh, any problems,” John said, “just let us know.” And he slammed the cab door shut and went after Sherlock.

The two of them paused twenty or thirty yards down the road. “So basically,” John said, “just a cab that happened to slow down.”

“Basically,” Sherlock said.

 _“Not_ the murderer.”

“Not the murderer, no.”

“Wrong country, good alibi.”

“As they go,” Sherlock said, looking slightly embarrassed.

“Hey,” John said, reaching out to the ID in Sherlock’s hand, “where’d you get this?” He looked more closely at it. “‘Detective Inspector Lestrade’?!”

“Yeah,” Sherlock said. “I pickpocket him when he’s annoying. You can keep that one, I’ve got plenty at the flat…”

John grinned, shaking his head, and half-turned away, starting to laugh. Sherlock looked at him, still panting, and perplexed. “What?”

“Oh, nothing. Just—” John couldn’t stop grinning. “‘Welcome to London.’”

He trailed off into a chuckle as Sherlock got that he wasn’t being laughed at, and smiled too. Both their glances went down the road at that point, though, and the mood cooled a little as they both realized that the cab’s door was open, and the passenger was talking earnestly to a uniformed constable in a high-vis vest, and pointing right at them.

 _Time to be elsewhere,_ John thought. “Got your breath back?” Sherlock said.

“Ready when you are.”

And hurriedly they legged it down the street and out of sight.

***

Not too much later the street door of 221B shut behind them. They staggered into the front hall and hung their coats up, and John leaned gasping against the wall at the bottom of the stairs. “That was ridiculous,” he said between breaths. “That was the most ridiculous thing—I’ve ever done.”

Sherlock leaned against the wall beside him. “And _you_ invaded Afghanistan.”

John broke down in a fit of the giggles, while Sherlock leaned laughing beside him. “That wasn’t—just me,” John gasped. “Why aren’t we back at the restaurant?”

Sherlock waved an unconcerned hand as he too gasped for air. “Oh, they can keep an eye out. It was a long shot anyway.”

“So what were we doing there?”

Sherlock cleared his throat a bit. “Oh, just passing the time. And proving a point.”

“What point?”

“You,” Sherlock said. He turned his head. “Mrs. Hudson?” he called down the hallway. “Doctor Watson _will_ take the room upstairs!”

“Says who?”

“Says the man at the door,” Sherlock said, looking that way with a smile.

And immediately came the sound of the knocker. John looked at him in surprise, went to open the door.

There stood Angelo from the restaurant. “Sherlock texted me,” he said, holding out John’s cane. “He said you forgot this.”

John stared at the thing as he took it, briefly dumbfounded: then back into the hall, at Sherlock’s broad smile. And with the reality of the cane in front of him—which he hadn’t needed or even thought about for the last hour, while he’d been running all over Soho and Marylebone like a maniac—came the memory of the broad wing-shadow that had blocked the light away from Sherlock on the rooftops, and how Sherlock’s eyes had glittered afterwards with more than restored moonlight. It had been mirth, too. _My God. How did I_ — _What did he_ — _How the_ bloody hell—?!

“Thank you,” John said. “Thank you!” And he shut the door and went back inside to take this up with Sherlock. _And what exactly do you_ say _at a moment like this? ‘How dare you cure my limp without consulting me first, you daft bugger?’_

In fact he was just about ready to start giggling again until he saw Mrs. Hudson coming down the hall toward them, her face distressed; and she sounded halfway to tears when she spoke. “Oh, Sherlock, _what have you done?”_

Sherlock looked at her, concerned. “Mrs. Hudson?”

“Upstairs!” she said.

Sherlock ran up the stairs two at a time. John did the same.

  


 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Waiting on_ is the act of a trained bird of prey when it circles at a height, waiting for game on the ground either to reveal itself or to be started from cover by the action of the falconer.


	5. Mewed Up

Sherlock threw open the upstairs door to 221B to reveal a flat crawling with police officers, and Lestrade esconced in his chair and giving him what John’s Mum would have described as a very old-fashioned look indeed.

“What’re you doing?” Sherlock demanded.

“Well, I knew you’d find the case,” Lestrade said. “I’m not stupid.”

“You can’t just break into my flat!”

“Well, you can’t withhold evidence! And I didn’t _break_ into your flat.”

Sherlock flung his arms wide. “Well, what do you call this?”

Lestrade looked briefly and ironically thoughtful, and then “had an idea”. “It’s a drugs bust!”

John looked at him, incredulous. “Seriously? _This_ guy, a junkie? Have you _met_ him?”

And then he was quite surprised to see Sherlock turning back toward him with a face that had gone rather dark and still. “John,” he said in an undertone.

“—You could search this flat all day and you wouldn’t find anything you could call recreational!”

Lestrade continued to sit there with a smile that had grown just a touch more amused.

“John,” Sherlock said, leaning close to him and speaking low and intense, “you can pretty well shut up now.”

“Yeah, but come on—”

Sherlock merely looked at him with that dark, fixed expression: looked at John hard.

John returned the look. And then he got it: though he still couldn’t quite believe what he was getting. _“No.”_

“What,” Sherlock said; and it wasn’t a question.

 _“You?!”_ John said quietly, because it still didn’t seem to make sense.

“Shut up! _”_ Sherlock said, looking quite annoyed. He then immediately shifted that angry glance, and apparently the anger, to Lestrade. “I’m not your sniffer dog!”

“No,” Lestrade said with great equanimity. _“Anderson’s_ my sniffer dog.”

 _“What?”_ Sherlock turned as Anderson leaned out through the kitchen door and wiggled the fingers of a nitrile-gloved hand “hello” at him. “Anderson, what are _you_ doing on a ‘drugs bust’?”

“Oh, I volunteered,” said Anderson, snide.

“They all did,” said Lestrade. “They’re not strictly speaking _on_ the drugs squad, but they’re very keen.”

“Are these _human_ eyes?” said Sergeant Donovan, suddenly appearing in the kitchen with an indignant expression on her face and a jar in her hand.

“Put those back!” Sherlock shouted.

“They were in the microwave!”

“It’s an _experiment_ ,” Sherlock said with the annoyed dignity of a very misunderstood scientist.

“You can start helping us properly and I’ll stand them down.”

“Childish!”

“I’m dealing with a child. Sherlock, this is _our case._ I’m letting you in. But you do _not_ go off on your own. Clear?”

“Or what? So, so what, you set up a pretend drugs bust to bully me?”

“It stops being pretend if we find anything,” Lestrade said, more quietly.

John’s back began to sweat gently as he became profoundly glad he hadn’t left the Sig behind when they’d gone to Angelo’s. _I swear, this thing is going to_ live _in my Y-fronts from now on_ —

“I am _clean!”_ Sherlock said.

“Is your flat?” said Lestrade. “All of it?”

Sherlock wouldn’t look at Lestrade. Instead he started undoing one set of sleeve buttons. “I don’t even smoke,” he said, practically vibrating with anger—and something else, John thought, as Sherlock pulled up the sleeve to reveal the nicotine patch there.

Lestrade had come to stand by him. “Neither do I,” he said, pulling up his own sleeve to reveal his own patch.

Sherlock looked at it, threw his own sleeve back down into place and turned away: but the tension had broken. John, watching from the side, was getting the sense that there was much more history between these two than he’d suspected, and that it was complex: something to ask about later… assuming Sherlock would tell him. _Trust issues,_ John thought. _It takes one to know one. This may take a while…_

“So let’s work together,” Lestrade was saying. “…We found Rachel.”

Immediately Sherlock turned back to him. “Who is she?”

“Jennifer Wilson’s only daughter.”

“Her daughter,” Sherlock breathed, looking away, perplexed. “Why would she write her daughter’s name? _Why?”_

“Never mind that,” Anderson said from the kitchen, pointing, “we found the case! According to _someone_ , the murderer has the case, and we found it in the hands of our favorite psychopath!”

Sherlock’s head snapped around. “I’m not a psychopath, Anderson, I’m a high-functioning sociopath: do your research,” Sherlock said, favoring him with a withering look. He turned straight back to Lestrade. “You need to bring Rachel in; you need to question her. I need to question her.”

Lestrade gave Sherlock a thoughtful look. “She’s dead.”

“Excellent. How, when, and why? Is there a connection? There has to be—”

“I doubt it, because she’s been dead for fourteen years. Technically, she was never alive.” Sherlock stared at him. “Rachel was Jennifer Wilson’s stillborn daughter. Fourteen years ago.”

John breathed out a little sadly at that. Sherlock looked thrown. “No, that’s… that’s not right,” he said. “Why would she do that? _Why?”_

“Why would she think of her daughter in her last moments?” Anderson said from the kitchen. “Yup. Psychopath. Seeing it now?”

“She didn’t _think_ of her,” Sherlock said, suddenly intense. “She _scratched her name on the floor with her fingernails._ She was _dying._ It took effort. It would have _hurt.”_

John had to shut his eyes at that for a moment: the image was too clear. Yet in the next second a thought came into his head. “You said that the victims all took the poison themselves,” John said. “That he makes them take it. Well, maybe he—I don’t know—talks to them? Maybe he used the death of her daughter somehow?”

“It was ages ago,” Sherlock said, exasperated. “Why would she still be upset?”

All John could do for a moment was gaze at him, briefly astounded at all the places Sherlock’s deductive processes could show him when they could not show him _this._ Sherlock took in John and his reaction for several long moments, uncomprehending, and then belatedly it began to dawn on him that he’d misstepped. “Not good?”

“Bit not good, yeah,” John said.

The exasperation wasn’t all gone yet, though, and Sherlock leaned close to John, intent. “But if you were dying, if you were being murdered, in your very last few seconds what would you say?”

The gust, the fall, the uprush of the cluttered road, the savage everything-ending impact all along his whole body: it was all right here in the room with him now, in front of the eyes of John’s mind. He held himself still, too shocked for the moment to do anything but answer honestly. “‘Please God, let me live.’”

“Oh, use your _imagination,”_ Sherlock said, put out.

John simply looked at him. “I don’t have to.”

He saw the shock of that hit Sherlock, saw him actually shaken by it. But he was still in hot pursuit of the truth of what had happened to Jennifer Wilson, and couldn’t stop more than that second to acknowledge what had happened to John. “Yeah, but if you were clever, really clever, and you were running all those lovers— She _was_ clever. And she’s trying to tell us something!”

“Isn’t the doorbell working?” said Mrs. Hudson, who’d suddenly appeared in the doorway. “Your taxi’s here, Sherlock.”

“I didn’t order a taxi,” he barked, waving her off. “Go away!”

“Oh, dear, they’re making such a mess,” she said, regarding the police staff bustling about in all directions and pawing through the boxes in the kitchen. “What are they looking for?”

“It’s a drugs bust, Mrs. Hudson,” John said, taking a breath and trying to get himself back in some kind of order. Sherlock, for his own part, was stalking back and forth, holding his head or trying to steeple his fingers, trying to think and plainly not getting very far.

Mrs. Hudson looked nonplussed. “They’re just for my hip,” she said, “they’re _herbal soothers—!”_

Sherlock exploded. “Shut up, everybody _shut up!_ Don’t move, don’t speak, don’t breathe, I’m trying to _think!_ Anderson, face the other way! You’re putting me off.”

“What? My _face_ is?” said the (perhaps understandably annoyed) Anderson.

Lestrade glanced around. “All right, everybody quiet and still. Anderson, turn your back.”

“Oh, for God’s sake!”

 _“Your back!”_ Lestrade shouted. “Now! _Please!”_

John went to sit himself down in the comfy chair and think quiet thoughts, or at least quieting thoughts, insofar as that was possible in this craziness.

Sherlock kept pacing. “I’ve got to think, _quick—_ _”_

“Sherlock, your taxi!”

 _“Mrs. Hudson!”_ Sherlock roared.

She fled. A silence fell.

Sherlock straightened.

“Oh,” he said then, very softly. _“Ohh.”_

His face became transfigured with triumphant realization. “Oh, she was clever, _clever,”_ he crooned, moving toward the windows, then whirling back toward the searchers and to John and Lestrade. _“Yes!_ She’s cleverer than you lot, and she’s _dead!_ Do you see? Do you get it? She didn’t lose her phone. She _never_ lost it. She _planted_ it on him! When she got out of the car, she knew she was going to her death. She left the phone in order to lead us to her killer!”

“But how?” Lestrade said.

Sherlock stopped, dumbfounded. “What do you mean ‘how’?”

Lestrade shrugged at him. Sherlock spread his hands helplessly in complete frustrated disbelief at the irremediable obtuseness of everyone around him. “Rachel!” he said “Don’t you see? _Rachel!”_

Everyone stared.

Sherlock laughed a little overtaxed laugh. “Look at you lot,” he said more quietly, “you’re all so vacant. Is it nice not being me? It must be so relaxing.” His voice hardened again. _“Rachel is not a name.”_

“Then _what is it?”_ John said, and if he said it a little sharply, well, his nerves were beginning to feel a bit frayed with all this cooped-up drama.

Sherlock’s eyes snapped to his. “John, on the luggage,” Sherlock said, “there’s a label. Email address.”

John turned to the pink case while Sherlock woke up his netbook. “Uh, ‘Jennie dot pink at Mephone dot org dot uk.’”

“Oh, I’ve been too slow,” Sherlock said at the keyboard, fingers flying over it. “She didn’t have a laptop so she did all her business on her phone. It’s a smartphone, it’s email-enabled.” He had brought up the Mephone web page: now he was typing her email address into the “user” field of the login area. “So there was a website for her account. Her username is her email address, and, all together now, her password is…”

“Rachel,” John said, coming over to look over Sherlock’s shoulder.

“So we can read her email,” Anderson said from the kitchen. “So what?”

“Anderson, don’t talk out loud; you lower the IQ of the whole street,” Sherlock said with casual scorn. “We can do much more than just read her emails. It’s a smartphone; it’s got GPS. If you lose it, you can locate it online. She’s leading us directly to the man who killed her!”

“But he could have got rid of it,” Lestrade said.

“We know he didn’t,” John said.

“Come on, come on, _quickly!”_ Sherlock urged the computer as the “seeking” page with its locator map loaded up and tried to get a fix on the phone.

Mrs. Hudson came up the stairs again. “Sherlock dear, this taxi driver—”

Sherlock leapt out of the desk chair, distracted. “Mrs. Hudson, isn’t it _time_ for your evening soother?”

John took the opportunity to slip into the desk chair. Sherlock went to Lestrade. “You’re going to need some vehicles. We’ve got to get after him fast, this phone battery won’t last forever.”

“All we’ll have is a map reference—”

“It’s a start!”

On the screen, the web page was displaying a map of London inside the M25 now, and a dot. “Sherlock—” John said.

A second later Sherlock was leaning over John, staring at the screen as the map went larger-scale. “Sherlock, it’s _here._ It’s at 221 Baker Street.”

Sherlock stared: then looked up, astounded. “How can it be here? _How?”_

“Well, maybe it was in the case when you brought it back and it fell out somewhere—” Lestrade said.

“And I didn’t notice it? _Me?_ I didn’t _notice?”_

“Anyway, we texted him and he called back,” John said.

Lestrade turned to his people. “Guys, we’re also looking for a mobile somewhere here…”

Sherlock stood transfixed in the middle of the room, saying nothing, moving not at all. John heard Sherlock’s mobile signal an incoming text, and looked over his shoulder to see Sherlock look up from his phone and gaze out the windows onto Baker Street with an odd expression, one so intent it could have been mistaken for no expression at all. “Sherlock,” John said, “you okay?”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, “I’m fine.”

“So how can the phone be here?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ll try it again,” John said.

“Good idea,” Sherlock said, heading for the door.

“Wait, where are you going?”

“Fresh air, just popping out for a moment, won’t be long,” Sherlock said.

John looked after him with some concern. All the immediacy had gone out of Sherlock’s voice: he suddenly sounded like he was running on autopilot.

“You sure you’re all right?”

“I’m fine.” His steps sped up as he headed down the stairs.

But “just a moment” turned into a couple of minutes, and then a couple more: and John’s personal nervousness radar started  pinging, telling him that whatever was going on with Sherlock, it _wasn’t_ fine. He picked up his phone to shoot Sherlock a quick text and ask him when he was planning to come in—and then he heard the engine revving outside the front door.

John stared out the window. “He just got in a cab,” John said, hardly believing it as he turned to Lestrade and Donovan. “He just drove off in a cab!”

“I told you, he does that,” Donovan said, disgusted. “And as he’s left again,” she said to Lestrade and then turned back to the police working in the kitchen, “we’re wasting our time!”

And now John knew why Jennifer’s phone had seemed to beat 221. _It was sitting right outside at the kerb. And Sherlock’s_ —o _h,_ God, _what has that idiot_ done?

“I’m calling the phone,” John said to Lestrade. “It’s ringing out.”

“If it’s ringing, it’s not here—” And Lestrade understood now.

“I’ll try the search again,” John said, going for the netbook.

Donovan was still preoccupied with her snit. “Does it matter? Just leave it. He’s just a lunatic, and he’ll always let you down. And he’s wasting your time. _All_ of our time.”

Lestrade thought for a few long moments, then let out a sigh. “Okay everybody,” he said at last, “done here…”

They started picking up their things, packing up their equipment. John stood there for some moments watching Lestrade put on his coat. “Why did he have to do that?” the DI said, sounding both confused and disappointed. “Why did he have to leave?”

“You know him better than I do,” John said.

“I’ve known him for five years,” Lestrade said, “and no, I don’t.”

John wasn’t quite sure what to make of that. “So why do you put up with him?”

“Because I’m desperate, that’s why.” Lestrade headed for the door, then paused there, looking back at John. “And because Sherlock Holmes is a great man.” The words were spoken with a tinge of mockery: but not as if Lestrade didn’t also think they were true. “And I think one day, if we’re very, very lucky, he might even be a good one.”

He turned and left.

***

And now John was alone; and as the minutes passed, he started to become more and more afraid. He stood a moment in the doorway of the flat, flexing his right hand; it was stinging him a little today from all the cane-work he’d had to do while plunging around in Sherlock’s wake. _What now, where do I go from here, what can I do—?_

He looked around, saw his cane lying across a box on the desk: a fixed point of sorts in this all this unpredictable flux and change, a symbol of habit. John went to it and picked it up, thinking he might possibly need it tonight, somewhere along the line. _If the leg gives out on me again._ Then he started for the door. _Sherlock, damn it… Where do I even start? The phone’s there, you’re with the phone_ — _but does no answer mean that you’re already_ —

John resolutely pushed that thought away. _No. Trust Sherlock to be too smart to just up and kill himself because someone tells him to. He’s so much smarter than that. He’ll buy all the time he can. Buy_ me _time. So_ think!

And just as John was reaching the door, the netbook chirped for attention, then began to ping.

John came back, dropped the cane against the chair, picked the netbook up: saw the moving trace, clear, heading south.

He slapped the netbook shut, snatched it up and ran for the door.

  


 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A _mews_ is the caged enclosure (or grouping of them) where one or more human-trained birds of prey are kept while not being exercised or actively hunting. To “mew up” a bird is to confine it, normally for short periods, keeping it from its normal hunting habits while some other problem or issue is addressed.


	6. Yarak

John got a cab mercifully quickly, though he then immediately confused the cabbie by telling him that he wasn’t sure where they were going and he was going to have to navigate him in to their final destination in stages. “I’m using one of those web things, mate, I’m following a friend and I can’t reach him and it’s urgent. He’s in another cab, they’re heading—they’ve just gone around Hyde Park and they’re heading down—yeah, the Old Brompton Road now. Right, I’ll coach you as we go along, cheers!”

Then he got on the phone, calling New Scotland Yard, but he didn’t have the slightest idea how to reach Lestrade directly. _Don’t have his mobile number, why didn’t I get it from him before he left, stupid,_ stupid!  _Though would he even have given it to me? Never mind, use what you’ve got!_ He was through to the NSY switchboard now, but the operator was being useless. “Yes, Detective Inspector Lestrade. I need to speak to him, it’s important. It’s an emergency!”

John glanced down at the screen again while the operator passed him to some other operator, while he watched the trace on the netbook’s screen moving, changing direction. “Uh, left here, please, left here!”

The cab angled north a little, necessary if they were to keep on the track of the other, which was heading southwestward now, toward West Kensington and continuing through it. John was thanking Thoth or whatever god handled Internet affairs that Sherlock was signed up for one of those new cloud-based wireless services: anywhere there was a cell, he had wifi. But John was twitching nonetheless, for he didn’t like the way the netbook had lost the trace while it was just sitting there in the flat where the signal was good. _If it can’t keep track it’s going to lose him all over again and we’ll wind up driving in circles—_

The cab slowed, running into traffic: then stopped, caught in the midst of it. Slowed again, stopped again. “What is it?” John said to the cabbie.

“Sorry, guv, emergency services or something up there, you see the lights?” Blue lights flashing, but they were no good to John. The netbook’s trace kept moving; Sherlock was well southwest now, practically out to Hammersmith. And they sat, and sat…

John could have pounded the cab door in frustration, but restrained himself. Finally they started moving again. But then, as they cleared the obstruction ahead, a pair of ambulances attending some kind of minor crackup, John was horrified to see the netbook lose the trace, the map freezing, the dot gone. Half a mile or so on, with John already in a cold sweat, it came back.

Then it vanished again, and John waited while they kept driving… and it didn’t return.

 _No. No, no,_ no! John clutched his head: and an awful thought occurred to him. _Dammit,_ _could that bastard cabbie have brought him this way on purpose? Through places he_ knew _had bad mobile reception, where he_ knew _Sherlock couldn’t call anybody for long periods, couldn’t be tracked?_ For even in London there were such bald patches; even websites charting them, for people who for some reason didn’t want to be found. _So he could get Sherlock out past where help could reach him in time, and then_ —

 _This isn’t working,_ John thought, his heart going cold. But there was no choice now. He had to try his only other option. “Stop here!” John shouted at the cabbie. “No, right here, this is fine! Let me out, it’s okay.” He leapt out of the cab, threw money at the man through the open front window, and then stared around him in desperate haste at yet another faceless central-London neighborhood high street, walled around by shops and flats and taller buildings.

 _This is no good. It’ll be way too much work to get up and out from right here. I’ll tire myself out getting to altitude and have nothing left to get where I have to go. Height, I need height_—

And right there in front of him, up reared an office building, some mid-Seventies concrete and steel concoction: ugly as sin, but thirty storeys at least. _Thank you, God, it’s hardly the Shard but it’ll do!_  John paused just long enough to spread his fingers out over the sidewalk as Sherlock had spread his out in the cold room in the Brixton house. He felt the air stirring through them: the small shy beginnings of an updraft. Even at night in a city with a heat footprint like London’s they persisted until late.  _It’s enough to be going on with. It’s got to be. Let’s go!_

John brought his wings real right out there in the street, yanked out the police ID Sherlock had left him as he raced into the building, skidded to a halt in front of the security desk, and flashed Lestrade’s stolen ID at them. “Which elevator for the roof? Police business, I need to get up there right now!”

The bemused guards stared at him, obviously not having any idea what might be going on; but they instantly caught John’s urgency… or maybe they were just impressed by fledging that looked so powerful it absolutely seemed like it should belong to someone in law enforcement. One pointed at a pair of elevators down at the end of the bank. “Here,” the other guard said, “access door’s locked, you’ll need this.” He fumbled in a desk drawer, came up with a key.

“Thanks!” John grabbed it out of his hand, turned and ran for the elevator, punched its up button about twenty times, and then stood shifting from foot to foot in unbearable tension, staring at the laptop’s screen. _There._ The trace, moving. _No,_ frozen again, hourglass going around…

 _Come on, come_ on! Then _ping!_ went the elevator as its door slid open. “Door opening,” it said, dulcet.

John jumped in, hammered on the topmost button, which said _32_. “Door bloody _closing_ already, come _on,_ you bloody thing—”

“Door closing,” said the elevator, smooth and uncaring, and the doors seemed to close about as fast as molasses flowing. _Clunk,_ went the elevator, starting upward.

 _Fucking_ glaciers _move faster than this,_ John thought in an agony of haste. “Come on, _hurry up!_ _”_  He stared at the screen in desperation. _No signal. Not in here. There’s got to be some up there_ —

 _Up there._ John’s stomach was twisting at the thought of what he was going to do. _But this is the smartest way. You’d just better make it work, because if you don’t, there’s no one else who can help him in time, no one else…_

The glacier had put on some speed while he was psyching himself up. “Door opening!” the elevator said. John threw himself through it before it was finished opening, stared around him, saw the alarm-barred door that said ROOF, and flung himself at it, fumbling with the key.

The door opened. John charged up the stairs and burst out through the door at the top, shoving the key in his pocket as he took stock of his surroundings. Flat graveled roof, forty, maybe fifty yards wide: John ran out into the middle of it, whirled to work out where to go. Metal tower behind him, absolutely festooned with mobile emitters: _perfect._ He stared at the netbook’s screen. The hourglass going around, around, around…

There, with a flash of the ACQUIRED herald, the trace was there again, the map spinning and sliding sideways to reorient itself to his new location. _Still southeast._ John jerked his head sideways, flung his wings out wide and raced across the roof. _Railing._ He jumped it. A few yards past it, a low parapet, maybe three feet high: then empty air.

 _Down,_ John thought, gulping air and not stopping, running toward the edge. _A whole_ lot _of down, down there._ The old vision overlaid itself inescapably over the one John was about to see firsthand: patchwork streets, cars, the incessant movement below, and then the failed wing, the uncontrolled plunge, the dark smashing blow that would end it all…

And also, looking down in his mind, as if from out of the window at Baker Street, he saw a cab pulling away, dark vanishing in darkness.

John hugged the netbook to him as he made the parapet, leapt up onto it, and flung himself out into the night, thrusting his wings against the void—

Instantly he plunged toward the street like a rock, not getting the resistance he’d expected from the updraft, _misjudged it,_ _falling,_ pinions thrashing desperately to slow him, _not again, no,_ Sherlock—!

And then the wind caught properly under his wings as John got his control back and found his balance, catching the updraft. It was weaker than he’d expected when he’d felt its beginnings at street level, but now it got stronger as he got established in the heart of it and started working it for height. But now the buildings across the way were sliding toward him at speed, an unforgiving wall that interfered with the flow of what updraft there was here. _Need more height, though, fast!_ He thrust those big wings down twice a second, cambered them deep and beat them hard, hard, _hard_ on the downstroke, and thought eagle thoughts, thought fucking _condor_ thoughts—

 _…Starting to get some vector now, pulling up,_ the buildings across the way slowed their rush straight at John and started gradually to drift downward as they pushed nearer in a wall of glass and steel, _more, come on,_ more, they were drifting down faster now, _up, work up, push the air, push it down, push it_ down—

But then came the gust, kicking him sideways straight toward the tallest building that he was trying to clear, and John’s guts seized. But he beat, beat with his heart, _beat_ —

And the gust wrapped around him and pushed him up and over with the final beat, up into empty air. Then the updraft settled in under his wings and started helping him higher…

John gasped his last breath out and sucked in a new one for what seemed the first time in about a minute. Then he went for altitude, stretched his wings out until he felt the sinews crack, maximized his loadbearing surface and flattened his angle of attack, stretching the wings into the shallow V of the typical aquiline soaring dihedral and spiraling upward and outward at increasing speed as other neighboring updrafts melded with the smaller one he’d been riding. There was no telling how long this conjunct updraft would last, how high it would bear him: he needed all the gliding height out of it that he could get. At the same time John was all too aware of being inside Heathrow’s terminal control area—quite near their final approach corridor, in fact—and he really didn’t care to catch an Airbus in the small of the back while he was concentrating on matters much more important…

John pulled the netbook away from his chest just enough to get another glimpse of the screen, while keeping his left shoulder angled into the long flat bank that was still taking him up and up on the rising air. _Southeast, still,_ he thought, having a little trouble making sense of the map at the moment; the Web client on the netbook really hadn’t been designed for use by someone circling fifteen hundred feet over central London. Of course there was an app for that, but John hadn’t exactly anticipated needing it. _It’s like the bloody gun all over again. If I’m going to be living around Sherlock I’ve_ got _to start rethinking my daily kit…_

He gulped _. Assuming he lives through the night._ Focus!

Yet as he stared down and around to get his bearings, John couldn’t stop the exultation roaring through him in the wake of _not_ winding up as a flat splat of skykill. _God how I’ve missed this!_ he thought, his veins practically prickling with the adrenaline and the sheer beauty of the view and the absolute joy of getting half his life back again. _Why did I deny myself this, why didn’t I even_ try _going high sometimes, what was wrong with me?_ But there’d be time to work that out later. _Fifteen hundred feet_ _did I say? Nearer two thousand. Good. More than enough to get out that way, and then_ —

John concentrated on making the best speed he could, picking up height and at the same time angling southeastward, while keeping an eye on the giddy spinning of the netbook’s map while he watched the city pour past him in an endless gridded yellow-glowing landscape. And then he realized that the trace hadn’t moved for nearly a minute now. Sherlock’s cab had stopped.

He watched it for another minute, two minutes, as he kept drifting that way, feeling the updraft starting to weaken under him. John tapped at the screen to enlarge it, get a name for where he was going. _Roland-Kerr Further Education College._

 _Now,_ John thought, and turned out of his gyre, throwing himself southeastward toward the place where the cab had stopped. _Speed, the need for speed…_ The wind direction shifted as he turned, actually giving him some tailwind. John changed his wing angle to make best use of it and started dumping altitude to speed himself up, rowing through the air with the big fierce wingbeats that always quickly ate up the miles. The city poured past more quickly below him, glittering, but not fast enough to make John happy, not by half. _Let’s be there already, let’s_ go!

The wind roared in John’s ears: he couldn’t hear whatever pinging noises the computer was making above the noise, but the trace was still steady, still not moving, and he was within a mile of where it had stopped. _No, less._ _Half a mile. There it is_ — Two big patches of flat roof, side by side. By the time John was a quarter mile away, he’d shoved the netbook back into the donkey jacket’s big pocket again and zipped it shut. An eighth of a mile away John sucked in a big breath, folded his primaries together till the wingtips were pointed like a peregrine’s, bent the wings half back toward his body, braced his arms down along his sides, and pitched forward and head-downward in full stoop.

He dropped toward those buildings like a stone out of the dark at a seventy-degree angle, acceleration and G-force and wind pushing the skin of John’s face out of shape as he plunged toward the right-hand roof. He was desperate not to brake too soon, unwilling to grudge a second longer than necessary for landing: the thought of Sherlock alone with that killer was squeezing John’s guts like a fist. Not until a scant two hundred feet above that roof did he pitch backwards and snap his wings out and open. The air smashed into them all over like hitting a wall as John flared, but he had plenty of practice in such high-speed landings from Afghanistan and knew he could take 3 Gs or better when he had the wings braced right. He beat hard to brake, then about twenty feet above the buildings’ roof level banked hard leftward before he’d dumped too much of his airspeed to do a pre-landing recce.

John swept past the back of the right-hand building, up around its right side: saw some windows lighted, some not, and the only sign of life in the lighted ones was some guy in a coverall pushing a Hoover. _And who knows if they’re even in a room with lights on? No way to tell_ — John banked again and swept around the front corner of the right-hand building. There was the cab, and it was parked exactly between the two buildings, giving him no way to guess which Sherlock and the killer might have entered. _The lady or the tiger? Never mind. Finish the sweep, then pick one and start searching!_

John dropped lower and swept around the left-hand building now, getting close to stall speed but looking in every window he had time to focus through. Nothing but one other lighted room with someone cleaning a window. _No more time for this._ _Land up, start working your way down the first one!_

John hastily stroked his wings a last few times to put him up onto the roof of the right-hand building, then flared and dropped by the little upstanding structure where the building’s rear stairs came up to the roof. He folded his wings, vanished them, ran to the stairwell door. _Locked, is it locked, please don’t let it be locked!_

It was locked. John swore. But looking it over he saw that its hinges were on the inside, and it wasn’t armored or reinforced. _Just a glorified fire door._

He kicked it. Nothing. Kicked it again, with everything he had, in an absolute fury of frustration. On the second kick the lock gave and the door crashed inward. John plunged in and ran down the stairs in the dark, ran almost full tilt into the door at the bottom, yanked it open, ran through: stopped.

A long hallway running right down the length of the building, front to back. Seemingly endless numbers of doors opening off to both sides. _Four floors of this… assuming I’m even in the right place._ Dammit, _Sherlock!_

He started running.

***

John had helped clear enough buildings in his first deployment out east to know the drill. _Clear a floor. Then move down one, hold still and_ listen. _Be systematic. Don’t let your panic drive you. But if your gut speaks, listen to it. Sometimes it knows things you don’t._

But John’s gut was silent for the moment, doing nothing much but twist in ever-increasing fear for the man he sought. Hallway after hallway, room after room, some lighted, some not. Staring through every door’s window, pulling open those that had none, no time to take the care he’d prefer to, and every time finding nothing, every time his heart hammering harder.  _Hold your nerve. Be ready. It could be any moment that you come through a door and see him. And for all you know the other guy’s armed…_

Down a stairwell to another floor. Another long, long line of doors. Run, open them, run again—

…lit rooms, dark rooms, lit ones, dark ones, and John’s heart pounding. There was too much leisure for bad imaginings in this kind of search, too many ways to see in your mind what would happen if you failed. John pushed those images away, refusing to see the pale eyes squeezing shut in anguish, the planes of the intent, handsome face disfigured by the twisted rictus of tetanic spasm. Another lit room, another dark one…

 _Wait!_ There, across the way, a light, and something that had just moved.

John plunged through the doors and skidded to a stop near the empty room’s window, staring in shock through the window and across the gap between this building and the next. Standing in that other room were two shapes. And the cry that hadn’t made it out of John’s throat when he was falling off a thirty-storey building now wrenched itself out of him:

_“Sherlock!!”_

It was happening, right in front of him but horrifyingly out of reach. Against a door in the opposite room stood a faded little cabbie in a flat cap, in his way as beige as John’s horrible bedsit, facing the window and his intended victim. He could see the cabbie’s mouth moving as he spoke to Sherlock, second after second, just kept talking to him. And with his back to the window, and to John, there was the coat, the head of dark hair, and a hand slowly lifting up above Sherlock’s head to examine something small in the chilly fluorescent light.

The hair went up hard on the back of John’s neck at the slow intensity of the gesture, at the horror of the tiny thing in Sherlock’s hand, as deadly as any snake. John shivered all over to realize how right he’d got it earlier. _Maybe he says something to them and they kill themselves…_  John’s blood was running icy, his sweat was going cold. _Four people he’s already killed this way. Ordinary people._

_But Sherlock’s not ordinary!_

Yet there was no depending on that frail hope. Extraordinary abilities Sherlock might have, but John knew already that he also had extraordinary weaknesses. He felt sure that the monster standing across from Sherlock would know at least some of what those were: would be exploiting them right now. Had _succeeded_ in doing so, if matters had got to this point. And if somebody didn’t do something right now, the odds were strong that in minutes Sherlock would be lying twitching on that floor as the poison blasted through his blood and extinguished him…

John reached into the back of his waistband, suddenly hearing his firearms instructor’s voice from what seemed an eternity ago. “Not just the eagle’s wings, Lieutenant. The eagle’s eye. It’s no fluke! You’ve got it.” And so it had proven, both on the range and in combat. It’d been a pleasure to discover that _that_ part of his wings’ personal diagnostic, at least, was true: a joy to be right at something, right _for_ something, beyond any possible doubt.

Yet that had been another time. And the RAMC was nominally not an armed unit. Their comrades in arms took pride in protecting them, because on the battlefield a doctor was busy with other life-and-death matters. An RAMC man rarely drew his own weapon except in self-defense or to save life in the last resort—

 _No question of what_ this _situation is._ And John’s pre-RAMC training and combat deployment with the Fusiliers had left him with a weapons skillset and a turn of mind that not many field surgeons could match. _Two windows,_ he thought, shoving the terror to the back of his brain as he’d used to do every day and shaking down into combat-marksman mode. _Not good. Let’s improve the odds._ Quickly John pushed forward, kneeled himself up on the window’s high sill and examined the smaller louver window in the middle of it. _Good, no lock, too old_ —

He pulled his sleeve down over his hand and with it covering his fingers reached up to tilt the louver window open; then scrambled back down and pulled out the Sig, clicked off the safety. _Not a great situation. Still one pane of glass. Not double-glazed though, thank God for listed buildings. And it’s gusting tonight. Wind channeling between the buildings, speeding up when it gusts. Air’s steady for the moment…_ But the thought of the gust in Maywand, the one that had come out of nowhere and almost ended his life, now stroked prickling up the back of John’s neck. If that wind gusted too hard at the wrong moment—

 _Forget that._ There were other problems. _They’re almost in line. No clean angle from here, it’s got to go right past Sherlock’s arm, and if he all of a sudden moves sideways—_ John swore under his breath as he started lining the shot up in his head. _This is the shot you’ve got and you have to take it. God damn it, Sherlock, why get so fucking_ statuesque _all of a sudden, every other minute of the day you’re in motion, just_ _move over to the right_ _a little_ now!

But he wasn’t going to move. And on the far side of that other room John could see the cabbie raising his hand toward his mouth as he spoke… and though he couldn’t see Sherlock’s hand, he could just see the movement of his elbow that meant Sherlock was lifting the deadly little thing to his lips.

John gulped as the small of his back actually flushed hot with the adrenaline blasting into him from above his kidneys. _That’s it, the bastard’s got him._ _He’s going to do it!_

He lifted the Sig and sighted on the sweet spot: two inches down from the collarbone, an inch right of the sternum, level with the xiphoid process. _Sherlock, I take it back, don’t move an inch. You either, you sonofabitch. Wind, hold steady._

Then John let his breath out, stopped breathing—

 _Please, God,_ let him live!

—set his arm for the kick, and—

_Squeeze._

The crash of the shot was probably deafening inside the confines of the room, but all John’s senses were narrowed down to one for the moment, his sight. And what he saw was the small sharp brutal kick of the impact, an inch and a half down from the cabbie’s collarbone, an inch and a half right of the sternum, just a shade above the level of the xiphoid process, _not too bad, must have been a little wind but right in the heart anyway,_ and the cabbie was smashed spinning sideways and backwards by the impact, then down out of sight—

John had seen the poison pill fly out of Sherlock’s fingers in reaction to the crack of breaking glass as the bullet went past him. Now Sherlock was reacting: in a second he’d be looking this way. Instantly John snapped the gun’s safety on, then went low and made for the doors, butting one open with his shoulder and twisting through with his arms crossed over his chest so as to keep prints and GSR off the surfaces. He ran down the hall the way he’d come, touching nothing, shoving the Sig back in place. Up the stairs he went, two or three at a time, through the broken door onto the roof, and then brought his wings real and started rowing hard against the air as he ran for the edge and dove off, heading into the wind for the sake of the extra lift and working for fast height. _Got to get at least a mile or so out and then get groundbound before the police reach the area—pretty soon now, because Sherlock’ll be dialing 999 right this minute. Find someplace within quick walking distance that won’t be noticed._

He found a likely spot in a small unlighted park near a school about a mile and a quarter away; circled down, flared about six feet above the ground, and landed, gasping. Then John pulled the netbook out again to let it get its bearings and confirm the way he should be walking, though he had a pretty fair idea of that already from the aerial view. While it did that, for a few moments John just stood still there in the dark, folding up his wings and looking up into the night sky at he didn’t know what: the stars, maybe…a few very bright ones were visible. He found that he was shivering. Not really with cold, not with post-shot nerves—John knew what those felt like—but with a strange sense that something had just been forever altered: that he’d either lost something important, or found it. He couldn’t tell.

At last John shook his head, sent his wings away, consulted the netbook for the best route to where he needed to be, and started walking.

***

About fifteen minutes later, when he was fairly close to the college buildings, several police cars with lights flashing passed him. John followed them in to the front of the college and made his way as unobtrusively as he could to stand just the other side of the incident tape.

“Oh, see you caught up with your ‘colleague’, finally.”

John looked past the tape and saw Sergeant Donovan coming toward him. “Sergeant,” John said, “where is he? Is he all right?”

She sniffed. “Found the nutter, it seems like,” she said. “Bloke had two pills, one poisoned, one not. Freak was supposed to pick one, then he’d take that and the killer’d take the other. And wouldn’t you know, right in the middle of it along comes somebody and puts a bullet in the guy with the pills.” She shook her head. “For all I know, he could have got himself shot too. But looks like he got lucky.” She gestured with her head back toward the entrance of the college. “Back there, when D.I. Lestrade’s done with him.”

“Thank you,” John said. Donovan favored him with an expression that looked to be about half-and-half pity and disgust, and wandered off.

John concealed the annoyed look he felt like awarding her in return and moved a little closer to the main concentration of people and cars. There was only one ambulance on the scene, and Sherlock was sitting on its back steps, exchanging words with Lestrade while tastefully festooned in an orange stretcher blanket. After a moment Sherlock stood up and started talking nonstop while Lestrade listened to him attentively. As he spoke Sherlock glanced first at Lestrade, then off into the middle distance, that figuring-it-out-on-the-fly look that John was learning to recognize. Sherlock’s attention turned briefly back to Lestrade, and finally outward toward his surroundings as he continued ruthlessly working something out to its logical conclusion, at which point his gaze fell on John…

And froze there. Whatever he was saying, as John met his eyes, Sherlock trailed off. He gazed back at John for a good two or three seconds before his eyes narrowed ever so slightly, a look that was a question.

In answer John glanced idly away and went back to looking like an innocent bystander, particularly one innocent of having just shot a man a few careful inches above his God damned cabbie badge. _How the_ hell _is the city licensing people like that, plainly the taxi certification board needs looking into_ —

It was a silly thought, an artifact of his tension, and John put it aside forcefully and went back to keeping an eye on Sherlock when he knew he wasn’t being looked at. Lestrade was still talking to Sherlock, but Sherlock had turned away and was now testily shaking the corner of the stretcher blanket at him. He briefly raised his voice enough to be heard saying, “Oh, what _now?_ I’m in shock! Look, I’ve got a blanket!”

John had to turn away to hide his smile. The conversation continued at a lower volume, and when John turned back and stole another glance at Sherlock, that was enough to confirm his initial assessment that the ambulance crew were either running on autopilot or insane; he’d never seen anyone less shocky-looking in his life. Sherlock was eating all this up, was in fact in what looked like perfect fettle for him. _For someone I’ve known for thirty-six hours._ Yet John had a whole different set of instincts that he trusted besides the merely personal ones, and those were telling him that Sherlock was fine.

Shortly thereafter Sherlock strode away from Lestrade, pulled the blanket off his shoulders and chucked it in through the window of the police car John was standing by, then stepped under the incident tape and paused, looking down at him.

“Sergeant Donovan has just been explaining everything,” John said, projecting calm concern in case anyone else was listening. “Two pills. Dreadful business, innit? Dreadful.”

Sherlock merely stood with his hands in his pockets and gazed down at John, his face quite still. Then, very softly indeed, he said, “Good shot.”

“Yes,” John said as casually as he could; “yes, must have been, through that window.”

“Well, you’d know,” that dark voice murmured.

They both went silent for a moment, just looking at each other.

“Did you get the powder burns out of your fingers? I don’t suppose you’d serve time for this, but let’s avoid the court case.”

 _Let’s._ It was strangely warming. John cleared his throat, looked away for a moment to regain his poise.

Those eyes were regarding John with concern now. “Are you all right?”

“Yes, of course I’m all right.”

“You have just killed a man.”

“Yes—”

That the admission came so readily to him in the company of someone he’d known for all of thirty-six hours was as surprising to John in its way as the look with which Sherlock was now favoring him, an expression both incisive and oddly gentle. John wasn’t quite sure how to take it, partly because it was a little distracting to have that attention fixed so closely, so completely on you.

 _Well, take it at face value and move on._ “That’s true, isn’t it,” John said as softly. And then he raised his voice a bit. “…But he wasn’t a very nice man.”

“No,” Sherlock said after a moment. “No, he wasn’t really, was he?”

“Yeah, and frankly, a bloody awful cabbie.”

Sherlock actually chuckled at that. John was doubly satisfied in his diagnosis now: shocky people didn’t chuckle much. “That’s true, he was a bad cabbie,” Sherlock said as he turned and they started walking away together. “You should have seen the route he took us to get here.”

Your _route? You should have seen the route he brought_ me, _mate!_ John thought, and to his own surprise he dissolved briefly in a giggle of releasing tension. But Sherlock caught that reaction, almost as if he’d heard John’s thought; and John _saw_ him catch it, then set the issue aside for later, chuckling as they walked away. “We can’t giggle at a crime scene,” John said, “stop it!”

“You’re the one who shot him, not me—”

“Keep your voice down! Sorry, sorry… nerves, “ John said as they made their way past Donovan. She merely threw them a glance about halfway between resignation and annoyance, and walked on.

They kept going. Then John paused; the question wouldn’t wait. “You were going to take that damn pill, weren’t you.”

“Of course I wasn’t. Biding my time.” Sherlock gave John a look of amiable superiority. “Knew you’d turn up.”

It was intentional misdirection, tossed out to see if John would swallow it: or else wishful thinking. For the moment John didn’t care. “No you didn’t,” he said. “It’s how you get your kicks, isn’t it. You risk your life to prove you’re clever.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because you’re an idiot,” John said, in a tone of voice meant to imply the word _Obvious._

The response was a small but very genuine smile: unexpected appreciation. Sherlock glanced aside for a moment, as if briefly following some private train of thought. Then he met John’s eyes again. “Dinner?”

“Starving.”

They strolled away toward the street. “End of Baker Street there’s a good Chinese,” Sherlock said, “stays open till two. You can always tell a good Chinese by examining the bottom third of the door handle…”

John had to shake his head and smile at how every sentence that came out of the man’s mouth had to be about proving the point he’d been denying just moments ago. And then he saw someone he recognized getting out of a car nearby, and a chill took John by the neck and stroked the hairs there erect again. Interestingly, the man who stepped out did not bring out his eagle-owl fledging for display as the car door shut behind him. _Now why, I wonder?_ John thought, idly noticing Anthea also exiting the car while texting away as usual.

 _You’d wonder what you’d have to do to get her to stop that…_ he thought, and then pushed the thought aside: there was much more important business afoot. “Sherlock,” John said. “That’s him, that’s the man I was talking to you about.“

“I know _exactly_ who that is,” Sherlock said in an angry undertone, and headed over toward him.

“So,” said Sherlock’s “arch-enemy” as he approached and they all paused. “Another case cracked. How very public-spirited. Though that’s never really your motivation, is it?”

Sherlock glanced around as if concerned that someone might see him with this person. “What are you doing here?”

“As ever, I’m concerned about you.”

“Yes, I’ve been hearing about your concern,” Sherlock said, plainly annoyed.

“Always so aggressive. Did it never occur to you that you and I belong on the same side?”

“Oddly enough,” Sherlock said, “no!”

John watched all this unfold while trying to catch hold of an elusive impression that had been fluttering against the back of his brain, trying to get his attention. Something, someone this man reminded him of—had indeed reminded him of before, in the warehouse, not that he’d had time to get into it then.

“We have more in common than you like to believe,” said the man with the umbrella. “This petty feud between us is simply childish. People will suffer.”

…and suddenly John remembered the odd look of challenge in this man’s eyes, back in that warehouse, and the one in Sherlock’s earlier that day, back at their flat. A peculiar kinship of a sort—

“—and you know how it always upset Mummy.”

John’s eyes narrowed. _Wait,_ what? He glanced at Sherlock.

 _“I_ upset her?” The annoyance was turning to subdued outrage. _“Me?_ It wasn’t _me_ who upset her, Mycroft!”

“Now, now _wait_!” John said. This had veered in a direction he hadn’t really expected. “’Mummy’? Who’s Mummy?”

“Mother. _Our_ mother,” Sherlock said, annoyed. “This is my brother Mycroft.”

Mycroft threw a sidewise look at John as if to see how he was taking this revelation. For the moment, it seemed to John that just standing there with his mouth a little bit open while he just tried to process all this was possibly the wisest course. “Putting on weight again?” Sherlock said to his brother.

Mycroft looked annoyed. _“Losing_ it, in fact.”

“He’s your _brother!”_ John said.

“Of course he’s my brother.”

John shifted. “So he’s not—” _A man who kidnaps and intimidates people for obscure purposes?_

“Not what?”

Mycroft was regarding John with a slight frown: a _What will you say now?_ expression. John, out of the old habit of politeness, for the moment restrained himself: especially since the description “The most dangerous man you’ve ever met…” floated through his mind at the same time, and it struck him that caution might be the wisest course to take for the moment. “I dunno—a criminal mastermind?”

“Close enough,” Sherlock said, still annoyed; but a touch of amusement had crept into his voice with John’s assessment.

“For goodness’ sake,” Mycroft said, “I occupy a minor position in the British government—”

“He _is_ the British Government,” Sherlock said, with both relish and some scorn. “When he’s not too busy being the British secret service, or the CIA on a freelance basis—”

Mycroft appeared to be studying his umbrella, or possibly his shoes. “Good evening, Mycroft,” Sherlock said with a slightly antiquated courtesy that nonetheless came across as venom. “Try not to start a war before I get home; you know what it does to the traffic…” He walked away.

John started after him, but then paused by Mycroft, who was watching his brother’s departure. “So—when you say you’re concerned about him, you actually are concerned.”

“Yes, of course.”

“And it actually _is_ a childish feud.”

Mycroft looked pained as he gazed after his brother. “He’s always been so resentful. You can imagine the Christmas dinners.”

“Yes,” John said without thinking. And then the images and possibilities began to rise before his mind’s eye. “No,” he said hurriedly, “ _God_ , no…” He glanced back toward Sherlock, his eyes crossing Anthea’s in passing.

“Right. I’d better, um…” And now that things were heading towards getting back to normal—granted, a kind of normal that John had never experienced before and which was probably going to take an awful lot of processing—his eyes properly focused on her. “Hello again.”

She looked at John with those pretty dark eyes. “Hello.”

“Yes, we met earlier on this evening…”

Her eyes now widened with the kind of courteous interest (or a brilliantly ironic simulation of it) that you bestow on someone who claims to know you, and who you can’t remember ever having seen before in your life. “Oh!”

 _Well,_ this _is going nowhere._ “Okay,” John said, and glanced back at Mycroft. “Good night.”

“Good night, Doctor Watson,” Mycroft said behind him as John turned away and hurried a little to catch up with Sherlock.

They fell into step as they made their way toward the street. “So, dim sum,” John said.

“Mmm,” said Sherlock. “I can always predict the fortune cookies.”

“No you can’t.”

“Almost can.” _An admission of fallibility,_ John thought, amused. _Amazing how one bullet can change everything…_ As it had done before. It was a very strange thing to feel the world shift and rebalance itself underneath you… “And what you can’t,” John said, “you guess at.”

“I never guess.”  


“Yes you do.” He let the amusement show in his voice.

Sherlock was smiling at something else now, though. “What are you so happy about?” John said.

“Moriarty.”

“What’s Moriarty?”

“I have absolutely _no_ idea.” But Sherlock’s eyes were already alight with interest, with the thought of a new mystery to solve. John got the sense, as they headed side by side toward the nearest high street where they could pick up a cab, that he was going to be seeing a lot of that expression in the future.

That, as far as he was concerned, was all fine.

***

They made their way back to Baker Street and went to the near-empty Chinese, which (regardless of the condition of the door handle and the lateness of the hour) was excellent. And between the cold pickled chicken feet and the moon cakes, through the _char siu_ dumplings and the _mapo dofu_ , they took turns filling in the gaps in each other’s stories. John told Sherlock what had happened after Sherlock left the flat, holding nothing back in case it might somehow be useful to him: his fear, his reasoning, his flight. And as if feeling after the fact that one revelation possibly deserved another, Sherlock told John what had happened on his cab ride and in that chill silent classroom: the version of the story that the police didn’t know, and never would—the flattery, the last-minute deductions, the soft insinuations, the final near-fatal temptation. The restaurant finished emptying around them as John sat shaking his head, putting in a word here, asking a question there. He was, though he kept it to himself, quietly astonished to be hearing so much of this—for Sherlock’s trust issues, John felt sure, ran as deep as his own. _Or as mine did._ But, John realized, in one department of his life at least, that was all over now.

 _And maybe for him too, to a certain extent. Just like that._ What would make the difference, perhaps, was that now Sherlock knew for the first time that there was someone to share the secret with. From now on there would be a mystery inside the mystery, an added level of interest, maybe even excitement, because there was an ally to share what was going on—and one who companioned with Sherlock of his own free will.

 _…We’ll see how it goes,_ John thought. Only time would tell. All he could do was shake his head at what had happened: and what might yet.

_Amazing…._

Around quarter to two Sherlock’s energy was visibly ebbing: his eyelids were drooping as he drank his tea. John beckoned to their waiter, who had just begun lingering off to one side with that please-go-home-so-we-can-close-up-now expression, and asked him for a _mao tai_ while raising his eyebrows at Sherlock and making the International Scribble-On-Your-Hand-Like-A-Waiter’s-Pad gesture: _and the bill?_

Sherlock nodded. The waiter went off, then returned a few moments later, bringing a little short-stemmed glass and a bottle. He poured the glass as full as it could hold, till the liquid bulged up at the top, and left to deal with the bill.

John bent down toward the table to look at the glass across the liquid’s trembling meniscus. Sherlock watched John scrutinising it, then bent down as well to see exactly what John was examining. The paper-thin curtain of vapor running down off the liquid was nearly invisible. But the thin tremor of the liquor’s fumes could just faintly be seen rising from the curve of the liquid at the very top of the glass, then rolling down over the sides. John glanced up from the meniscus to the silver-grey eyes looking across the glass at him: grinned.

Sherlock raised his eyebrows: his nostrils flared. “Smells like diesel. —Flammable?”

“Wouldn’t strike a light if I were you.” John straightened up just enough to slurp the top quarter-inch of the stuff off the glass, then picked it up. “Cheers,” he said, and knocked the rest back in one go. After a long second spent absorbing the sensation of the _mao tai_ burning its way down his gullet, John put the glass down very gently, shook his head once in a gesture suggestive of someone shaking his brains back into place, and sat there blinking.

Sherlock watched with interest while John’s eyes gradually stopped watering. Then John looked up from the empty glass at Sherlock again. “Something we always used to do after a firefight,” he said, “when everyone came home. Or after a night in theatre when everyone made it off the tables breathing.”

Sherlock nodded.

John sighed and poured the last of the tea out of the pot into Sherlock’s cup, into his: then picked his up, for there was one last thing that he felt needed saying, and this mood of weary satisfaction seemed like the best place to insert it. “You do realize,” John said, “that there was _no_ good pill?” He was restraining himself from voicing the blunter version of what was in his mind: _Bloody brilliant as you are,_ _you were played._ But it seemed a little early for such blunt speaking. He hadn’t even finished moving his things in yet, not that there were exactly tons of them.

Sherlock looked at John a bit somberly as he finished his tea, pushed the cup aside. “John, I believe I told you that when he—”

John shook his head. “No, Sherlock.” He finished his own tea, put the cup down. “Sorry. Once you agreed to play his game, both pills were bad. You want to prove you’re clever? Fine. Prove it to _me_. _I_ won’t kill you. But if you’re going to be the world’s only consulting detective, you need to stay alive to do the job… not let yourself get suckered into other people’s games. You’ve got more important work to do.”

Sherlock was leaning on his elbows now, hands folded with the first couple of fingers steepled as he regarded John. “You appreciate that,” Sherlock said. “The Work.”

John nodded. “I think I will, yeah,” he said, “once I understand it better. Plenty of time for that. But for tonight…” He rubbed his face.

Sherlock nodded as the bill arrived, and the fortune cookies. John reached for his wallet: but Sherlock picked up the bill, shook his head. “Let me get this one,” he said. And if he wasn’t willing to voice the thought showing in his eyes, which looked suspiciously to John like _And thank you for saving my life,_ John wasn’t going to push the point. He simply nodded, taking delivery on the unspoken message, and answered what had been said out loud: “Thanks.” _Because who knows, mate? You may have just started saving mine._

While the debit card machine was doing its thing, Sherlock deduced the basic themes of their four fortune cookies (John was willing to allow him some wiggle room on the actual wording), and got two of them right. But there was no point in letting him get too smug about it. “Lucky guess,” John said.

“I never guess.”

 _“And_ the fact that you’re in here often enough to know exactly what all the major themes in their cookies are by now,” John said.

Weary as he was, Sherlock’s eyes danced at that. He laughed. “A shot in the dark.”

“Good one, though,” John said, grinning back.

The bill handled, they left. Outside, Sherlock turned up his collar and they made their way down Baker Street, almost empty this late as the city quieted around them. The walk was companionably silent: for the first time all day, Sherlock seemed to have nothing left to say, and John wasn’t inclined to break the mood. _A day when you kill leaves a mark. And a day when you save a life leaves a mark. And a day like_ this _… God only_ knows _what kind of mark it leaves. It’s all going to take some internalizing. But later for that…_

Minutes later, the front door of 221B shut behind them, a reassuring solid sound.

John pulled off his coat with a deeply relieved end-of-the-day sigh, hanging it up on one of the hooks by the door. Then on impulse he shrugged his wings into reality, shook and roused them a little, and settled them back into fold while wondering whether the upstairs bed was made up and what to do about sheets and so forth if it wasn’t. As he turned toward the stairs, he caught Sherlock looking at him, sidelong—and was immediately reminded of the similar glance, secretive but also somehow assessing, with some unspoken question behind it, that Sherlock had given him in Angelo’s.

“What?” John said.

The hall’s wallpaper seemed to be fascinating Sherlock all of a sudden. “John, there’s something I should tell you. I don’t normally… I mean, as a rule I wouldn’t—”

John tilted his head, looking curiously at him. Sherlock’s eyes were a little hard to make out in the dimness. “Sherlock, what? What’s wrong?” _Is this something to do with whatever Lestrade was going on about? The drugs thing? Oh, God, can’t this wait till morning?_ But no way was he going to say that right now.

Sherlock was actually fidgeting. “John, I—” His expression had shifted. Now it looked like some variation on _I dare you_ … but John was no longer sure of who was being dared into what. Something concealed was struggling to get free, against what looked like considerable resistance. John just looked at Sherlock, bemused, and waited.

“It’s not something that I’ve ever… I mean, you would be one of very few people who would know, but you have a right to, I suppose. I wasn’t entirely honest with you. About something important. I should have made it plain from the start, when I had a chance, in Angelo’s.”

 _Oh God no,_ John thought, suddenly going cold, _this is about_ that. The Can of Worms was about to manifest itself in all its uncomfortable glory; and John began to sweat. He’d been hoping for at least a little respite on this, a little time to prove that it wasn’t going to be a problem, that he understood, that they could be flatmates just fine without there being any tension about the issue— But no. He’d completely misread everything at dinner, completely misconstrued the confidences, the apparent ease between them. And now he could just hear what was coming: it was already over. _This has just been too much stress, I can’t have anyone else involved in what I do and you’ll understand that it’s not you_ specifically, _it’s just that_ —

Sherlock took a breath. “When I deduced that you were fledged—”

And John’s brain, which had been flapping off unhappily in one direction, now simply left off flapping and stalled in midair as he realized the problem lay elsewhere entirely.

_Oh no._

_Don’t tell me he’s a featherchaser._ Don’t _tell me this is his kink. Oh,_ God. _Really,_ really _a bit not good._

And then John was ashamed of himself. _Oh, come on, there are wingfree people who’re just interested, who’re not into it because it’s a_ thing. 

… _And even if he_ was—

“—I feel it’s only fair to tell you that I wasn’t exactly working in a data vacuum at the time—”

John blinked. _What? …Wait. Well, of_ course _not, because he got hold of my medal citations somehow, and it would have been obvious that I was fledged because—_

Then John stopped himself. _No,_ he thought. _He knew in the_ lab. _He knew_ immediately. ___“Sherlock!”_ John said.

Sherlock stopped, looking apprehensive.

“Just _say_ whatever you’re trying to say, for God’s sake! Not that I give a toss at this point, but _h_ _ow could you tell?”_

Sherlock took a deep breath. “Well,” he said, with another of those odd smiles—this one both abashed and somehow strangely hopeful— “you know how it is. Sometimes it just…” And the shadow of unfolding night-black pinions slowly began to darken the downstairs hall. “…takes one to know one.”

A second later, it wasn’t just the darkness of broad raven’s wings filling the place. It was the sound of one man who drew in a long deep breath and was promptly lost in helpless giggles; and then (after a pause) of another man letting it go and laughing with him, dark and deep, an octave lower. Between them they made such a racket of complete, delighted relief that not even Mrs. Hudson’s herbal soothers were enough to keep her from opening her door a crack to see what was going on. “Oh my,” she said then, seeing them start jostling their way up the stairs, still laughing; the raven first, the raptor after.

“You complete and utter _git,_ why didn’t you just—”

“I prefer not to have it _known_ , John, especially by the criminal element—”

“Wait, _me,_ the _criminal element??”_

“—no, of course not, you idiot, but if you’ll just consider the obvious advantages of keeping such information in reserve—”

“Oh, don’t give me that. Wait— _No!_ You couldn’t _possibly_ be sensitive about—”

“John, shut _up.”_

“Oh, God, look at those, are you kidding, how can you _possibly_ be a spread queen?!”

“You’re deducing without data, John, always a mistake. And accusing me of something as pedestrian as _overcompensation_ shows a complete lack of—”

John just caught the sound of the door to 221A closing below them, a moment before their own door shut. And if John suspected Mrs. Hudson’s smile of gaining some extra meaning when she’d realized what was going on, he wasn’t up to heavy analysis of it right then. He was home at last, and ever so glad to be here; even though he had _no_ bloody idea what being home was going to look like tomorrow.

Maybe that was the best part of it all.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In “manned”/human-partnered birds of prey, _yarak _is a state of complete focus on the hunt: the condition in which a raptor’s training, hunting weight, and mental focus all come together in the field, manifesting as a physically visible readiness to hunt and kill.__

**Author's Note:**

> "Fledged" will be followed in mid-2015 by "Entered", which parallels "The Blind Banker", and in late 2015 by "Tired", which parallels "The Great Game."


End file.
